Dear colleagues,

Abstract submission for the APS March Meeting (March 5-9, 2018 - Los Angeles, CA) 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 Alexie Kolpak (MIT), Noa Marom (Carnegie Mellon University), Adrienn Ruzsinszky (Temple University), and myself (UIUC). It is cross-listed in DCOMP, DCMP, DCP, DMP as 16.1.3, 05.1.7, 12.1.12:

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

Many properties of functional materials, interfaces, and nano-structures derive from excited electronic states and their real-time dynamics. 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. We aim to attract researchers working on the nexus of electronic and optical properties of materials, hot electron dynamics, and device physics.

This is also a continuation of the 2017 focus topic with the same name. Last year we had great attendance and lots of stimulating discussions and we would like to accomplish this again in 2018! Hence, if you are working in these fields of research, please consider submitting your contributed abstract to our focus topic. A strong showing from the community will ensure the FT's success and continuity. We’re looking forward to seeing many of you in Los Angeles!

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

Alexie Kolpak,

Noa Marom,

Adrienn Ruzsinszky,

Andre Schleife