Graduate and undergraduate courses

Our teaching efforts are focused on physical chemistry and computational chemistry. We are currently offering Intermediate Quantum Chemistry (AS.030.453) for the Fall semester and the Introduction to Computational Chemistry (AS.030.405) for the Spring semesters. We have taught Physical Chemistry II (AS.030.302) and Spectroscopy (AS.030.451).

Molecules for quantum sciences

Fundamental properties of molecules are of critical importance to chemistry, spectroscopy, and the emerging quantum sciences, broadly defined. For example, the use of molecules in precision spectroscopy and quantum information storage and processing requires precise control of molecular quantum states.

Our group have enjoyed collaborations with many colleagues in chemistry and physics. In these experiences, we have learned a lot of interesting things that are common knowledge in the other fields, thanks to the patience of our collaborators. Meanwhile, we found that the knowledge about molecular properties, to which the chemistry community are familiar with, is of interest to broader audiences. Based on our experience in these fruitful collaborations, we are summarizing the following notes aiming to provide useful information to scientists interested in molecules.

Lifetimes for molecular states

Long coherence time of quantum states is of critical importance to enhancing the precision in precision spectroscopy and to quantum computation applications. The lecture note below aims to merge well-known mechanisms for lifetimes of quantum states (spontaneous decay) with the less well known mechanisms such as background blackbody radiation excitations, both of which are important to realizing full quantum control of molecular states. Note that this “well-known” and “less well-known” vary among audiences.