Light harvesting systems and the many-body problem: Insights from first-principles theory

Date

Feb 21, 2018

Time

5:15 PM - 6:30 PM

Speaker

Stephan Kuemmel

Affiliation

University of Bayreuth

Language

en

Main Topic

Physik

Other Topics

Physik

Description

Humans are striving to build organic material based systems that convert sunlight into other forms of energy, e.g., organic solar cells. These efforts face many challenges. Nature, on the other hand, has perfected the harvesting of sun light in bacteria and plants for ages. In understanding the energy- and charge-transfer processes that govern the electron dynamics in light-harvesting systems, first principles theory can play an important role. The complexity of the underlying many-particle problem however limits the use of wavefunction based approaches. Density Functional Theory, on the other hand, can bring the necessary computational efficiency, but is challenged by the complexity of the underlying electronic problem. The talk will review these challenges and discuss recent successes in overcoming them. The latter give rise to the hope that excitation dynamics in light harvesting systems can be predicted and visualized from first principles.

Last modified: Feb 21, 2018, 8:36:18 AM