We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

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October 15, 2014

Speaker: Michael Schuurman, National Research Council of Canada

Title: Simulating Photoinitiated Molecular Dynamics with Ab Initio Quantum Chemistry

Abstract: The absorption of a photon of light by a molecule is the first step in a process that can yield numerous competing dynamical relaxation pathways that ultimately result in disparate chemical outcomes that include radiative decay (flourescence, phosphoresence), nonradiative decay (internal conversion), or fragmentation. Constructing a microscopic understanding these processes has immediate and obvious implications on a wide swath of photochemical problems, including artificial light harvesting and mechanisms of photodamage on the DNA of biological systems. In this talk I will present techniques by which the excited electronic state dynamics of molecular systems can be interrogated on the natural femtosecond timescales of vibrational motion. In particular, I will focus computational and theoretical approaches for simulating these processes, which invariably involve nonadiabatic transitions between electronic states and are often mediated by the presence of conical intersections. The relationship between experimental results and computational simulation, and the best methods to compare the two, will be explored in detail. Time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy will be shown to be a particularly sensitive probe of the type of dynamics (i.e., vibronic) of interest and it will be shown that the direct simulation of these experimental observables using ab initio approaches is the most unambiguous, and thus preferred, manner in which theory can complement complex time-resolved experimental measeurements.