The collision dynamics of the NO+Ne system is investigated in a molecular beam scattering experiment at a collision energy of 1055 cm(-1). Employing resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization of NO, we measured state-resolved integral and differential cross sections for the excitation to various levels of both spin-orbit manifolds. The dependence of the scattered intensity on the laser polarizat...

This project deals with theoretical modeling and calculation of the properties of defects in CIGS and CZTS absorber materials. The long term goal is predictive models for defect evolution, impurity kinetics and phase transformation in these materials to enable optimization of fabrication processes for maximum cell efficiency and reliability. A tool for calculation of the concentrations of domin...

Based on the normalized elimination of the small component relativistic formalism, a new approach to the calculation of hyperfine structure parameters of paramagnetic molecules is developed and implemented. The new method is tested in the calculation of the isotropic hyperfine structure constant for a series of open-shell molecules containing mercury. The results of calculations carried out in ...

Potential energy surfaces form a central concept in the application of electronic structure methods to the study of molecular structures, properties, and reactivities. Recent advances in tools for exploring potential energy surfaces are surveyed. Methods for geometry optimization of equilibrium structures, searching for transition states, following reaction paths and ab initio molecular dynamic...

A polarizable water pair potential was determined by fitting a potential form to microwave, terahertz, and mid-infrared (D2O)2 spectra through a rigorous calculation of the water dimer eigenstates. It accurately reproduces most ground state vibration-rotation-tunneling spectra and yields excellent second viral coefficients. The calculated dimer structure and dipole moment are very close to thos...

This paper describes a hybrid ab initio quantum mechanical/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) method for calculating activation free energies of chemical reactions in solution, using molecular mechanics force fields for the solvent and an ab initio technique that incorporates the potential from the solvent in its Hamiltonian for the solute. The empirical valence bond (EVB) method is used as a referenc...

There has been a significant progress in ab initio approaches to the structure of light nuclei. Starting from realistic twoand three-nucleon interactions the ab initio no-core shell model (NCSM) can predict low-lying levels in p-shell nuclei. It is a challenging task to extend ab initio methods to describe nuclear reactions. In this contribution, we present a brief overview of the the first ste...

Previously we searched for the ab initio global minima of several SixHy clusters by a genetic algorithm in which we used the AM1 semiempirical method to facilitate a rapid energy calculation for the many different cluster geometries explored. However, we found that the AM1 energy ranking significantly differs from the ab initio energy ranking. To better guarantee locating the ab initio global m...

A semiclassical model is developed to describe plasmon-electron coupling and electronic damping of surface plasmons. It is compared with the ab initio linear response calculations for metallic thin films in the jellium approximation and for a realistic crystalline Mg(0001) surface. The semiclassical model is able to reproduce the quantum oscillations of plasmon linewidth, which was obtained in ...