A rather busy period for the ISPG!

A lot of things happened recently in the ISPG! Let’s try to give a quick summary here in a few points!

1. Congratulations to Joe who brilliantly defended his Master Project on the photodynamics of coumarin and pyrone!!! Joe will start a PhD soon in the group of Dr Adam Kirrander at the University of Edinburgh! All the best Joe and thanks for your time in the group!
2. Congratulations to Lea who published a very exciting article on a molecular version of Tully’s models to test nonadiabatic dynamics! This work is available here open access (initial conditions too if you want to test your method) and made the cover of PCCP (also highlighted as “Hot Article”)!
3. In another work, Lea studied the photodynamics of thiophenone after photoexcitation but also after it returned in the ground electronic state, leading to the athermal formation of numerous photoproducts! This work was done in collaboration with experimentalists who used time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy to follow the ring-opening of thiophenone. This collaborative work has been published in Nature Chemistry! Cover art by Lea.
4. Antonio, in collaboration with Lea and Emanuele, just published a work on how one can compute photolysis rate constant for Volatile Organic Compounds using nonadiabatic dynamics! This work emanates from our ERC Starting Grant SINDAM and offers exciting new perspectives in understanding the photochemistry of transient VOCs. The article was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters open access.
5. Antonio also worked on the photochemistry of quinine in collaboration with the groups of Dr. Paul McGonigal, Dr. Marc Etherington, and Prof. Andy Monkman. The work was showcased on the cover of Chemical Science!
6. The group also proposed a new method to perform Ab Initio Multiple Spawning, called Stochastic-Selection AIMS.
7. Finally, an exciting collaboration with the group of Prof Verlet on monitoring the adiabatic dynamics of a dye molecule in gas phase has been recently published in Nature Communications (Editors’ Highlight)!