Dear colleagues,

Abstract submission for the APS March Meeting (March 13-17, 2017 - New Orleans, LA) is now open! We would like to draw your attention to the Focus Topic "First-Principles Modeling of Excited-State Phenomena in Materials", organized by Noa Marom, Andre Schleife, Volker Blum, and Emmanouil Kioupakis (cross-listed as 16.1.6, 5.1.8, 12.1.8, and 14.1.3): 

https://www.aps.org/units/dcomp/meetings/focus-topics.cfm

Many properties of functional materials, interfaces, and nano-structures derive from electronic excitations. These processes determine properties such as ionization potential and electron affinity, optical spectra and exciton binding energies, electron-phonon coupling, charge transition levels, and energy level alignment at interfaces. Hot carriers in semiconductors and nanostructures are generated, transition between excited states, transfer energy to the lattice, and recombine with each other.

A proper description of electronic excitations requires theoretical approaches that go beyond ground state density functional theory. Advances in high performance computing and scalable implementations in several popular electronic structure packages enable further progress. While sophisticated calculations are accessible for many users and feasible for large, complex systems, these methods require cutting-edge expertise in order to successfully interpret experiments.

This focus topic is dedicated to recent advances in many-body perturbation theory and electron-ion dynamics methods for electronic excitations: challenges, scalable implementations in electronic structure codes, and applications to functional materials, interfaces, molecules, and nano-structures. It aims to attract researchers working on the nexus of electronic and optical properties of materials, hot electron dynamics, and device physics.

This FT is a merge of the two 2016 FTs "Many-Body Perturbation Theory for Electronic Excitations in Materials" and "Theory and Simulation of Excited-state Phenomena in Semiconductors and Nanostructures". If you are working in these fields of research, please consider submitting your contributed abstract to our focus session! Apologies for cross-posting, but a strong showing from the community will ensure the FT's success and continuity.

We wish you a pleasant fall semester! With best regards, 

Noa Marom,

Andre Schleife,

Volker Blum,

Emmanouil Kioupakis.