Writing grant proposals, reviewing grant proposals, writing papers, reviewing papers, organising symposia, attending symposia.... makes the days pass by. I can’t really complain seeing as I just came back from a week in Berlin and am now preparing for a month in Shanghai.
At the FHI-AIMS workshop in Berlin, I found that the Fritz-Haber-Institut really wasn’t what I had imagined. I had an image of German precision (glass, steel and digital clocks); instead, the place is like an old wealthy American suburb (grand elaborate mansions) except with real character. There are beautiful parks, streets named after physical chemists and an air of relaxation. At the meeting itself, progress in the FHI-AIMS code was quite impressive: electron transport, self-consistent GW, dynamic TDDFT, metadynamics are all either implemented or well on their way.
Publication update: We found that interstitial oxygen in Al2O3 exhibits a sensitive dependence on the spin and structural configuration: a singlet peroxide (dumbell) species is found to be the global minimum structure (in contrast to previous theoretical studies - it is easy to miss the ground-state if you don’t break the symmetry of the octahedral interstitial site). Chemical Physics Letters.