Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Executive Committee 
 Postdocs 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Ulam Scholar 
 
 Postdoc Nominations 
 Student Requests 
 Student Program 
 Visitor Requests 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Colloquium

Finding renewable energy materials using one screensaver at a time: Combinatorial quantum chemistry for organic photovoltaics.

Alan Aspuru-Guzik
Harvard University, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

During this talk, I will describe our group's efforts in the Clean Energy Project (http://cleanenergy.harvard.edu) , a collaboration with the IBM World Community Grid to search for novel materials for organic photovoltaics and organic electronics using computational resources from volunteer donors around the world. Our project aims to find new materials using techniques from ab initio quantum chemistry combined with cheminformatics tools that are usually employed for the discovery of novel pharmaceutical compounds. To date, we have computed more than five million structures using first-principles methods, and have analyzed three million using cheminformatics. I will describe our progress so far, and describe immediate goals. A computationally-predicted material with an unusally high hole mobilty of 13 cm2/Vs was synthesized by Zhenan Bao's group at Stanford. I will describe this experimental collaboration as well.

Host: Sergei Tretiak, T-1, 667-8351