Quantum Matter Seminar

In his paper "More is Different", P. W. Anderson argued that "the constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity''. Indeed, the constructionist hypothesis starts to run into problems at the most microscopic level of interactions between atoms due to the poor scaling of quantum chemistry with the number of atoms. Classical force fields, which model molecules as balls on springs, are the standard method for understanding collections of thousands of atoms. In the past, the values of the spring constants in these force fields have been constructed in a rather ad hoc manner with only a tenuous connection to the underlying quantum chemistry. In my talk, I will describe work towards a Wilsonian approach for constructing simple, efficient, and accurate force fields that are grounded in ab initio quantum chemistry calculations