Please post and forward to your groups
________________
Center for Excitonics Seminar Series
Tuesday, April 24 , 2012
RLE Conference Room - 36-428
3:00 - 4:00pm
"Finding renewable energy materials using one screensaver at a time: Combinatorial
quantum chemistry for organic photovoltaics"
Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Harvard University
Abstract:
During this talk, I will describe our group's efforts in the Clean Energy Project
(
http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu) , a collaboration with the IBM World Community Grid to
search for novel materials for organic photovoltaics and organic electronics using
computational resources from volunteer donors around the world. Our project aims to find
new materials using techniques from ab initio quantum chemistry combined with
cheminformatics tools that are usually employed for the discovery of novel pharmaceutical
compounds. To date, we have computed more than five million structures using
first-principles methods, and have analyzed three million using cheminformatics. I will
describe our progress so far, and describe immediate goals. A computationally-predicted
material with an unusally high hole mobilty of 13 cm2/Vs was synthesized by Zhenan
Bao's group at Stanford. I will describe this experimental collaboration as well.
Bio
Alán Aspuru-Guzik received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1999. He received the Gabino Barreda Medal from
UNAM, which prizes the top achiever in each field of study. After receiving his PhD in
Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, under Professor
William A. Lester, Jr., he was a postdoctoral scholar in the group of Martin Head-Gordon
at UC Berkeley from 2005-2006. Professor Aspuru-Guzik carries out research at the
interface of quantum information and chemistry. In particular, he is interested in the use
of quantum computers and dedicated quantum simulators for chemical systems. He has studied
the role of quantum coherence in excitonic energy transfer in photosynthetic complexes,
and developed methodology for studying the spectroscopy of molecules in nanoscale
environments. He and his group recently developed a density functional theory for open
quantum systems. He leads the Clean Energy Project: a distributed computing effort for
screening renewable energy materials.
Light refreshments will be served
The Center for Excitonics is an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Dept.
of Energy, Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences