Condensed concepts

 Last week I enjoyed following the Nobel Prize announcements in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry. Reading the popular accounts...

 Members of my family have been reading  Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder, and things that sustain you when the world goes dark , a personal ...

This week I am giving two (virtual) talks at a meeting Light-matter Interactions from scratch: Theory and Experiments at the Border with Bio...

I was very sad to learn last week of the tragic death of Seth Olsen in an accident. He was a former collaborator and colleague at UQ. Seth...

When I learnt and later taught basic quantum mechanics I don't think the notion of energy level repulsion (or equivalently avoided cross...

Last week in Ljubljana, I had a nice discussion with Denis Arčon about this paper concerning fullerenes, A3C60 where A = alkali metal. Opt...

What is excited state proton transfer (ESPT)? Consider a hydrogen bond A-H...B in a molecular system. Suppose the system absorbs a photon ...

Conical intersections between potential energy surfaces get a lot of attention in the theoretical chemistry of electronic excited states (ph...

Previously I have posted about the fascinating challenge of understanding singlet fission [and the inverse process of triplet-triplet annih...

This post concerns what may be the fast known internal conversion process in a chemical system, non-radiative d ecay times in the range of ...

Today I am visiting the Chemistry department at Hyderabad Central University. My host is Susanta Mahapatra. He has done some very nice work...

Sean McConnell, Seth Olsen, and I just finished a paper A Valence-Bond Nonequilibrium Solvation Model for a Twisting Cyanine Dye We st...

Tomorrow I am giving a talk at the Condensed Phase Dynamics meeting in Telluride. The slides are here . It is largely based on two papers w...

The Berry (geometric) phase is a significant quantum effect which is associated with conical intersections on excited state potential energy...

Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro...

For the excited state dynamics of a specific chromophore in a solvent what are the essential degrees of freedom (electron...

Seth Olsen  and I are about to advertise for a postdoc to work with us at UQ. The flavour of our interests and approach can be seen in posts...

There is an interesting paper in Science The Molecular Mechanism of Thermal Noise in Rod Photoreceptors Samer Gozem, Igor Schapiro, Nicol...

How do single nucleons and associated excitations couple to collective degrees of freedom such as rotations and shape deformations? Is ther...

At the cake meeting I gave an informal talk on how a two-site Hubbard-Holstein model can illuminate some basic and important concepts in the...