CECAM Report

Program GASC

Organizers: Thomas Frauenheim (Bremen), Peter Déak (Bremen), Klaus Irmscher (Berlin), Susanne Siebentritt (Luxembourg),  Joel B. Varley (Livermore, California)

Venue: University of Bremen, Bremen Center for Computational Materials Science (BCCMS), Germany, 8th until 12th of October 2018

Sponsors: University of Bremen (BCCMS), Psi-k, DFG

Defect engineering in micro/optoelectronics and in photovoltaics has immensely profited from electronic structure calculations. In the past two decades, local and semi-local approximations of density functional theory were the workhorses of theoretical studies but, by now, it has become clear that they do not allow a sufficiently accurate and reliable prediction of defect properties in wide band gap materials. While ab initio energy methods for calculating the total energy are struggling with the system sizes necessary for defect modeling, semi-empirical methods using various corrections or hybrid functionals are being applied for the purpose. While the theoretical background of these methods and their relation to each other is by now more or less understood, the transferability of the semi-empirical parameters and the overall predictive power is still unclear. Progress requires further systematic testing and comparison of the various methods, as well as validation against experiments. For that, accurate measurement data on defects are needed on a set of materials, which are structurally or compositionally related. Gallium based semiconductors, like GaN, Ga2O3 and CuInxGa1-xSe(S)2 chalcogenides (CIGS) offer a good possibility for testing theory and are interesting also experimentally due to their versatile applications.

While there are still open defect-related questions in the much studied blue LED-material GaN, very few defects could be positively identified as yet in CIGS solar cell materials, while the research on the potential power semiconductor and UV transparent electrode Ga2O3 has barely started. Following the successful workshops on Gallium Oxide and Related Materials, held in Kyoto (Japan) in 2015, and in Parma (Italy) in 2017, as well as several workshops on chalcogenide photovoltaic materials, e.g., Symposium V at the E-MRS Spring meeting 2016, the CECAM-workshop in Bremen 2018 will focus on bringing together experimentalist interested in gallium oxide and Ga-based chalocgenides with theorists who are active in the field. A friendly and stimulating environment will facilitate discussions, adding impetus to both the development of practically applicable theoretical methods and to progress in the defect engineering of these materials.

Our workshop was held from the 2nd to the 4th of July at the Hotel Jäger von Fall which sits on a peninsula on the Sylvensteinsee, an artificial lake in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps near the Austrian border. This is a very remote location chosen deliberately to allow participants to concentrate fully on the scientific program. Transportation from and to the nearest train station was accomplished with a shuttle-bus courtesy of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), driven by some of the participating TUM members. For the most part the weather was very inviting, inspiring a small number of participants to take a refreshing swim during the breaks, it turns out that the water was very clear but also very, very cold.

The two evenings of the workshop where filled with a poster-session on Monday, held outdoors due to the lovely weather, and a conference dinner, again outdoors, on Tuesday.

The event was supported by Psi-k, the German science foundation (DFG), the international graduate school of science and engineering (IGSSE), as well as the Technical University of Munich.

The Workshop “Theoretical methods in molecular spintronics (TMSpin) was held at the Materials Physics Center of the University of the Basque Country in Donostia-San Sebastian from the 17^th to the 20^th of September 2018. This workshop welcomed 31 invited speakers and several postgraduate students presenting posters. The event was co-sponsored by Psi-k and the Donostia International Physics Centre (DIPC- http://dipc.ehu.es/).

Molecular spintronics is the study of spin-related phenomena in molecules and atoms and their possible applications for the next generation of data storage and processing devices as well as for the implementation of quantum computers. Electronic structure theory has played a prominent role in molecular spintronics. The comparison of theory and experiments has demonstrated the importance of first-principles calculations, which go beyond model representations of molecular devices as simple “quantum dots” or effective spin Hamiltonians. Nonetheless, standard electronic structure methods based on Density Functional Theory often fail in describing molecular spintronic systems even at a qualitative level. This is because most magnetic phenomena are manifestations of correlation effects, which become extreme at the single molecule scale and which are not captured by standard implementations and approximations of DFT. The goal of TMSpin was to address the question:

“What electronic structure theory to use for molecular spintronics?”

The workshops gathered theoretical physicists and quantum chemists with different areas of expertise. On the one hand there were those researchers that have provided important contributions to the advancement of molecular spintronics since its inception. They were asked to give an overview about the field and moreover to highlight the open questions that to date cannot yet be addressed by theory. On the other hand, the workshop gathered some of the leading researchers in theory and code development, who presented the most recent fundamental and numerical advancements for a number of methods. The organizers promoted an intense discussion to understand whether such methods can be already employed in molecular spintronics. Continue reading Workshop Report: “Theoretical methods in molecular spintronics” (TMSpin) →

Hotel Jäger von Fall, Lenggries, Bavaria, Germany
Organizers: Harald Oberhofer, Johannes Margraf
Webpage: http://macsims.ch.tum.de

Multi-scale simulation approaches rely on a hierarchy of increasingly accurate and highly resolved methods to capture the different time- and length-scales relevant to a process of
interest. Traditionally, this might involve coupling classical molecular dynamics with electronic structure calculations (QM/MM), or embedding a quantum mechanical system in a point charge
or continuum environment. In this context, the models comprising the individual layers of the multi-scale hierarchy are often unrelated. For instance, the empirical potential and DFT method in a QM/MM simulation are independently defined at the beginning of the simulation. Enormous advances in electronic structure algorithms and hardware now allow first principles calculations to be carried out on a truly massive scale. This leads to a novel perspective of multi-scale models: electronic structure data can be generated with high enough quality and quantity to allow the application of coarse graining and machine learning techniques. Instead of defining
separate physical models at different scales, the electronic structure method directly informs the next layer of the multi-scale hierarchy. The goal of this workshop was to bridge the gap between
traditional, layered multi-scale techniques and the more direct coarse graining and machine learning approaches to the simulation of extended systems, thereby bringing together researchers working on QM/MM or other embedding techniques with those who apply coarse graining and interpolation to electronic structure data in different contexts (e.g. potential energy surfaces, electronic properties, charge transport, rate constants in catalysis) and with different methods (neural networks, Gaussian process regression, kernel ridge regression, splining, etc).

Read the full report here.

Organisers: Michele Ceriotti, Tom Markland, Jeremy Richardson and Mariana Rossi

Dates: 25 -29 June, 2018

We convened a School on Path Integral Quantum Mechanics at the CECAM headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. The school gathered together 17 speakers (11 invited and 6 contributed) and 46 participants affiliated with 15 different countries. We
received a total of 85 applications to attend the school and unfortunately could not accept more participants due to space constraints in the lecture room. This amount of applications, only two years after we had the last school on the same topic, underlines
the growth of the community performing research on the theory and practice of Path Integral (PI) techniques for the atomic-scale modelling of the quantum behavior of materials and molecules.

As in the last school, we explicitly asked the speakers to prepare pedagogic talks aimed at introducing the participants to the methods and simulation techniques to treat imaginary and real time path integrals, for both adiabatic and non-adiabatic dynamics.
Invited and contributed speakers were encouraged to give lectures that explained the methods in great detail, so that the students could benefit the most from the school, even if this was their first contact with path integral methods.

Read the full report here.