Tags: Physical Seminar

Since its first discovery in 2006, Frustrated Lewis Pairs (FLPs) have attracted widespread attention for their ability to activate small molecules without transition metals. However, the exact mechanism of this activation remains a subject of debate. This seminar compares the two mechanistic models (the electron transfer (ET) and electric field (EF) models) and investigates the underlying physics governing these systems.
In 2025, the second iteration of a multidisciplinary campaign known as the Georgia WIldland-fire Simulation Experiment (G-WISE 2) was conducted. G-WISE 2 focused on how different wildfire fuel conditions, such as fuel bed moisture, mass loading, and the inclusion of a high organic fuel known as duff (Zhang et al, 2022), influenced the aerosols produced from the combustion of the fuel beds. Black carbon (BC) is a primary absorber emitted in…
We have examined the electronic structure of C5H5MgMgC5H5, or dimagnesocene, using high-level coupled cluster techniques. This research is suitable in light of the remarkable synthesis of the valence-isoelectronic diberyllocene by Boronski, Crumpton, Wales, and Aldridge. The Mg-Mg bond distance is predicted to be 2.758 Å, and the Mg-Mg bond dissociation energy is predicted to be 51.8 kcal/mol. Unique aspects to the present research are our…
Local pair natural orbital coupled-cluster methods have seen much success recently, allowing for the application of “chemically accurate” approaches such as CCSD(T) to significantly larger systems. Notably, the DLPNO-CCSD(T) approach of Professor Frank Neese and coworkers has been utilized to run computations on whole proteins such as crambin (636 atoms) and insulin (789 atoms). At the CCSD(T) level of theory, local approximations have errors…
Methane makes up between 70 and 90% of natural gas, of which there is an excess of 7000 trillion cubic feet of reserve on earth. While it can be used to heat homes, there is a lot of interest in converting it into value-added chemicals. Steam methane reforming produces syngas, a mixture of CO and H2, which is used as feedstock in industrial processes like the Fischer-Tropsch process. Since methane is relatively chemically inert, it requires high…
In this talk I will introduce vapor-assisted synthesis as a versatile technique to deposit metal-organic framework (MOF) thin films on solid substrates. Despite the large number of publications in the MOF community, only a small fraction of these publications focus on thin film synthesis. For certain applications, such as chemical sensors, thin films are necessary to reduce the response time and increase the analytical sensitivity of a…