In our transition towards a more carbon neutral environment, the development of aesthetically acceptable building materials capable of passively collecting solar energy is highly desirable. One strategy to achieve this goal is the harvesting of light from transparent surfaces, such as windows, by incorporation of highly efficient luminophores with absorption bands in the UV or IR region of the solar spectrum. Such light harvesting devices are known as luminescent solar concentrators. The principle of device operation involves the absorption of light by the luminophore whose emitted light is trapped in the waveguiding matrix and concentrated to the edges of the device. The concentrated light can then be efficiently converted to electric current by high-performance solar cells.
As part of our ongoing collaborations with experimental colleagues from The University of Melbourne, our highly accurate wave-function calculations helped to identify unusually fluorescent pyridinium enolates as ideal light harvesting chromophores for use in fully transparent luminescent solar concentrators. Full details of this collaborative research can be found in (Xu, J.; Zhang, B.; Jansen, M.; Goerigk, L.; Wong, W. W. H.; Ritchie, C.*, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.., 2017, 10.1002/anie.201704832).
Our new book chapter on the popular DFT-D3 dispersion correction is out. It forms part of an exciting new book on “Non-covalent interactions in quantum chemistry and physics”. (link to book).
Our recent collaboration with the Ritchie group published in Angewandte Chemie, was also featured in the May issue of Chemistry Australia, the monthly magazine by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (on page 16, “Six of one, ten of another”).
http://chemaust.raci.org.au/sites/default/files/pdf/2017/CiA_May%202017.pdf
The School of Chemistry has awarded Domi Wappett the JS Anderson Prize, which is given to the student majoring in Chemistry who displays the greatest aptitude and potential for research.
Congratulations, Domi. Well done!
The Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) awarded Dr Lars Goerigk the 2017 RACI Physical Chemistry Division Lectureship.
With this lectureship the Physical Chemistry Division of RACI allows outstanding early- and mid-career physical or theoretical chemists to tour Australia to present their research work. The lectureship will be officially awarded at the upcoming RACI Centenary Congress in Melbourne in July.
Welcome back to Dominique Wappett and Dale Lonsdale, who both rejoined my group as Masters students, as well as to Asim Najibi, who — after his successful First-Class Honours thesis — will embark on a new PhD project.
Our recent collaborative efforts with the Ritchie and O’Hair groups have been published in Angewandte Chemie.
We present a novel way of synthesising Mo-V polyanions, which had not been experimentally accessible before, by using microwaves. Our quantum-chemical calculations were important in understanding the resulting structures and their distribution.
English version in Angewandte Chemie International Edition: DOI: 10.1002/anie.201608589
German version in Angewandte Chemie: DOI: 10.1002/ange.201608589
Congrats to Asim Najibi for winning the poster prize at the Australian Symposium on Computational Chemistry in Perth.
Well done!
Our benchmark study on inversion and racemization barriers is now available as Open Access. It is the first thorough QM benchmark study looking at these processes in detail. http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjc-2016-0290
Contragulations to Asim Najibi for winning the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre Travel Award to attend the Australian Symposium on Computational Chemistry in Perth on 1-2 December 2016. The symposium will be held in honour of distinguished quantum chemists Prof. Leo Radom (The University of Sydney) and Prof. Jan Martin (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and thanks to the award, Asim will have the opportunity to meet some of the best people in the field of Theoretical and Computational Quantum Chemistry.
