Dear Group, Prof. Bin Chen from Louisiana State University is visiting Harvard this afternoon for the theoretical chemistry seminar series. His talk will be tomorrow: "Towards Understanding the Nucleation Mechanism for Multi-Component Systems: An Atomistic Approach" Prof. Bin Chen Theochem seminar 4 pm MIT, 56-154 Here is a link to his webpage, the talk abstract is at the end of this email. http://chemistry.lsu.edu/chem/facultypages/chen/chen.html His schedule is attached - thanks to all the people who agreed to meet with him today! Leslie -- Leslie Vogt Aspuru-Guzik Group Chemistry and Chemical Biology Harvard University -------------------------------------------------------- Towards Understanding the Nucleation Mechanism for Multi-Component Systems: An Atomistic Approach Despite decades of intense research efforts, the molecular details of atmospheric nucleation processes have been elusive and highly debated. Although laboratory experiments and field studies have provided important insights in the chemical species that are actively involved in these nucleation processes, there is very little information on the atomic-level structure of critical nuclei. The problem originates from the activated nature of these processes and the inherent difficulty in the direct probing of the critical nuclei as they are transient and their occurrence probabilities are extremely low. This presentation will focus on the recent development of the aggregation-volume-bias Monte Carlo based simulation method and the application of this atomistic approach to the molecular-level characterization of various nucleation processes. Topics will be selected from: (i) multi-component nucleation of water, n-alkane, and alcohols; (ii) ion enhanced nucleation of water; and (iii) extension of this technique to the crystal nucleation in super-cooled clusters.