Hi Friends,
We will have Professor Lorenz Cederbaum from the University of Heidelberg visiting our
group next week as part of the theochem lecture series. We have many open slots for both
students and postdocs to meet with him on Tuesday, October 13th, 2015 as well as spots for
both lunch and dinner. I’ve been assured that he’s not only an incredible scientist but
also a really nice guy, so please let me know if you want a chance to meet with him.
Additionally, he will be giving a talk on Wednesday at MIT in room 4-163 at 4pm. His
abstract is below:
Best,
Thomas
On systems with and without excess energy in environment
ICD and other interatomic mechanisms
Lorenz S. Cederbaum
University of Heidelberg
(
http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/cms/lenz.html)
Abstract
How does a microscopic system like an atom or a small molecule get rid of the excess
electronic energy it has acquired, for instance, by absorbing a photon? If this
microscopic system is isolated, the issue has been much investigated and the answer to
this question is more or less well known. But what happens if our system has neighbors as
is usually the case in nature or in the laboratory? In a human society, if our stress is
large, we would like to pass it over to our neighbors. Indeed, this is in brief what
happens also to the sufficiently excited microscopic system. A new mechanism of energy
transfer has been theoretically predicted and verified in several exciting experiments.
This mechanism seems to prevail “everywhere” from the extreme quantum system of the He
dimer to water and even to quantum dots. The transfer is ultrafast and typically dominates
other relaxation pathways.
Can there be interatomic/intermolecular processes in environment when the system itself
(again, an atom or small molecule) does not possess excess energy? The answer to this
intriguing question is yes. The possible processes are introduced and discussed. Examples
and arguments are presented which make clear that the processes in question play a
substantial role in nature and laboratory.