RBI Colloquium: "Role of Conical Intersections in Molecular Photophysics"
We are pleased to invite you to the RBI Colloquium: "Role of Conical Intersections in Molecular Photophysics" by Professor Wolfgang Domcke, Emeritus of Excellence, Technische Universität München, Germany. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, 8 July 2025 at 2:00 PM in the I Wing lecture hall, Ruđer Bošković Institute.
Conical intersections play a crucial role in photophysics and photochemistry. At conical intersection seams of electronic potential-energy surfaces, the molecular dynamics is dominated by a complete breakdown of the celebrated Born- Oppenheimer (BO) approximation. Starting from a historical overview of the BO approximation and the concept of conical intersections, this lecture traces the development of methods which allow the computational study of the ultrafast (femtosecond) nonadiabatic dynamics at conical intersections. A brief overview is also given of computational methods for the simulation of time and frequency resolved nonlinear spectra. It is demonstrated that photophysical dynamics can nowadays be scrutinized in unprecedented detail by the interplay of laser spectroscopy and computational chemistry.
Biography
Prof. Domcke's research focuses on the calculation of photoinduced chemical dynamics of polyatomic molecules. The methods comprise the ab initio calculation of electronic potential energy areas, the description of quantum mechanical wave packet dynamics as well as molecular spectra, especially time-resolved spectra of ultrafast photochemical processes. The main questions are the understanding of the photostability of biological molecules and the elementary processes of splitting water with sunlight.
After studying physics and obtaining his doctorate in theoretical physics at the TUM, he habilitated at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Freiburg i. Br. After a stay abroad at the California Institute of Technology he was Professor (C2) for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Professor (C3) at the TUM (1986 - 1995) and Professor (C4) at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. From 1999 - 2013 he held the chair of Theoretical Chemistry at the TUM. Prof. Domcke is a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and an external member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Approx. 420 scientific Publications, Hirsch Index 85 (2025).