Molecules. Atoms glued by bonds; nuclei incarcerated by electrons; electrons forming an inhomogeneous gas contained not by outer walls but by an electrostatic potential in its interior ironically named ‘external potential’ . Molecules. The study object of chemists. The fundamental construct on which the chemical understanding of the universe relies.

Density Functional Theory is by far the most successful way of gaining access to molecular properties starting from their composition. Calculating the electronic structure of molecules or solid phases has become a widespread activity in computational as well as in experimental labs not only for shedding light on the properties of a system under study but also as a tool to design those systems with taylor-made properties.

I’m very honored to have been invited to this edition of this long standing event, the Virtual Winter School of Computational Chemistry. In this talk I walk through the basics of what are excitons and how do they move or transfer across matter; and of course, a primer on how to calculate the energy transfer with Gaussian. This is a very basic introduction but I hope someone finds it useful.

I’m very excited and honored to participate in this year’s Virtual Winter School on #CompChem. This event started back in 2015 and this year the list of participants includes Nobel Laureate and legend Roald Hoffmann. The topics will range from drug design to quantum chemistry on quantum computers. Additionally, two workshops will be given for ADF and Gaussian.

The word ‘ umpolung ‘ is not used often enough in my opinion, and that’s a shame since this phenomenon refers to one of the most classic tropes or deus ex machina used in sci-fi movies—prominently in the Dr. Who lore*—and that is ‘ reversing the polarity ‘. Now, reversing the polarity only means that for any given dipole the positively charged part now acquires a negative charge, while the originally

The Mexican Meeting on Theoretical Physical Chemistry is a national staple of our local scientific discipline. The nineteenth edition had to be a virtual conference due to sanitary restrictions still enforced in Mexico. Nevertheless, this was a successful meeting in which we tried new things, such as a live broadcast via our new official YouTube channel and a Twitter poster session covered under the hashtag #RMFQTXIX.

I found this error in the calculation of two interacting fragments, both with unpaired electrons. So, two radicals interact at a certain distance and the full system is deemed as a singlet, therefore the unpaired electron on each fragment have opposite spins.

Once again, as the year before, I woke to my phone resembling a slot machine from any Vegas casino. #LatinXChem became a Trending Topic on Twitter early from it’s start on september 20th 2021, this year the Twitter poster session was divided into eleven categories (Ana, Bio, Comp, Edu, Eng, Env, Inorg, Mat, Nano, Org, Phys) with Nano and Comp being the ones with the most participants.

The energy of your calculated transition state (TS) is lower than that of the reagents. That’s gotta be an error right? Well, maybe not.

Electronic excitations are calculated vertically according to the Frank—Condon principle, this means that the geometry does not change upon the excitation and we merely calculate the energy required to reach the next electronic state.

The war against COVID-19 has been waged in many fronts. The computational chemistry community has done their share during this pandemic to put forward a cure, a vaccine, or a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms behind the human infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.