CCL: APS March Meeting 2017, Focus Topic

 Sent to CCL by: "Schleife, Andre" [schleife++illinois.edu]
 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
 Emmanuel 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.
 --
 André Schleife
 Blue Waters Assistant Professor
 Department of Materials Science and Engineering
 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
 Email: schleife(_)illinois.edu
 Phone: +1 (217) 244 0339
 Web: http://schleife.matse.illinois.edu