There will be a Focus Session on "Recent Advances in Density Functional Theory and Applications to Chemical Physics" at the APS March Meeting in Baltimore MD, March 14--18, 2016. The full description follows below. There will also be a pre-meeting tutorial on DFT and TDDFT on the Sunday immediately before the meeting.

We hope that you and your group members will come and participate in the meeting with oral contributions. Please submit your abstract as usual via http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/  by the deadline Friday November 6, 5pm EST, specifying the sorting category 5.1.5 (Division of Chemical Physics). 

5.1.5: Recent Advances in Density Functional Theory and Applications in Chemical Physics

Density Functional Theory (DFT), in both its ground-state and time-dependent (TD) flavors, is an exact reformulation of the quantum mechanics of many-body systems. Used in more than 10,000 papers annually, DFT provides an unprecedented balance of accuracy and efficiency for electronic structure and response calculations in molecules, clusters, and solids. DFT is often the only computationally feasible, quantum mechanical approach to some of the most interesting and topical problems in chemical physics today: including catalysis, stacking interactions in DNA, the design of solar cells, many aspects of photodynamics, molecular, ionic, and electronic transport, and time-resolved spectroscopies. There are however many problems for which there is room for improvement in the currently used functional approximations and formulations of DFT; these applications include strongly correlated and multireference systems, transition metal chemistry, dynamics far from equilibrium, and globally accurate potential energy surfaces, and there is significant on-going progress to address these challenges. Even in situations where approximate density functionals tend to work well, more needs to be done to understand why and to improve the approximations. And the effort to find universal methods that work well in all the areas of interest, as required for the most complex applications, also continues. This symposium highlights some of the recent advances in both theory development and applications. The symposium is open to contributed talks to complement the invited talks and to broaden the scope.

Invited Speakers: Evert Jan Baerends, Kieron Burke, Laura Gagliardi, Paola Gori-Giorgi, Hardy Gross, Karsten Jacobsen, Georg Kresse, Mark Pederson, Angel Rubio, Viktor Staroverov, Jianwei Sun
Organizers: Donald Truhlar, Neepa Maitra, John Perdew