ICTP-EAIFR is pleased to welcome Neepa Maitra of Rutgers University, USA, for a Condensed Matter Physics online seminar, to be held on February 10, 2022, at 16:00 GMT+2.

Entitled "Exact Factorization Approach of Coupled Electrons, Ions, and Photons" the talk will be open to all with pre-registration; participation is free. Maitra's research, done at Harvard, Berkley, City University of New York, and Rutgers, now focuses on time-dependent density functional theory, fundamental aspects of functionals, and exact factorization for coupled electron-nuclear dynamics.

Abstract: Whether perturbed away from the ground state, or driven by either classical or quantized light, the dynamics of molecules involves a complex interplay of electronic and nuclear motion taking place in a landscape of a multitude of Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surfaces. Yet often one is interested in just one of the subsystems, either the electronic motion (e.g., in charge-transfer or ionization dynamics), or the nuclear motion (e.g., in chemical reactions), or the photonic system (e.g., in superradiance). This talk discusses the "exact factorization approach", in which one can rigorously define a Schroedinger equation for the subsystem of interest, in which the potentials contain all the coupling to the other subsystems exactly. The original theory was formulated for the electron-nuclear problem, and, after presenting the formalism, and some examples, I extend this to the light-matter interactions in cavity-QED, with applications to mixed quantum-classical methods for photo-induced dynamics in molecules, and the newly burgeoning field of "polaritonic chemistry".