Group news

Nov 2, 2009 We welcome Johannes Hachmann. He is joining us from the group of Garnet Chan (Cornell) and will be working with us in the Clean Energy Project. Welcome Johannes!
August 22, 2009 Roel Sanchez-Carrera just won the prestigious CINF-FIZ award at ACS!. Congratulations ROEL! Here is the information: The winner of this year’s CINF-FIZ Scholarship for Scientific Excellence has been selected. The jury selected Roel S. Sanchez-Carrera of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts based on the work he submitted. The application deadline for the scholarship competition for the jointly sponsored award from FIZ CHEMIE and the ACS (CINF) was March 20, 2009. Each year, young scientists can apply by the deadline, submitting an abstract and poster of their work in the field of chemical information and related sciences. The scholarship award is in the amount of $1,000 and will be presented to Mr. Sanchez-Carrera as part of the ceremonies for the ACS fall meeting in Washington DC on August 17, 2009. We would like to congratulate and thank all the competitors for the numerous projects submitted.
August 7, 2009 Our paper on On the chemical bonding effects in the Raman response: Benzenethiol adsorbed on silver clusters was just accepted by Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics .
July 10, 2009 Alan just got awarded the DARPA Young Faculty Award.
June 30, 2009 Congratulations to Ivan Kassal for obtaining a best poster award at the International Conference of Quantum Chemistry, held in Helsinki, Finland. Ivan's poster is entitled "Quantum Information for Chemistry".
June 24, 2009 Our papers on the Role of Quantum Coherence and Environmental Fluctuations in Chromophoric Energy Transport and Multiple coherent states for semi-classical dynamics have appeared online. One of them in ASAP format and the other with the full reference.
June 24, 2009 We posted the first version of our SCIGPU-MGEMM CUDA matrix chopper library online at our scigpu.org website. G A paper submission by the GPU team is soon to follow.
June 24, 2009 Our paper Quantum Process Estimation via Generic Two-Body Correlations was posted in the arXiv e-print server last week and submitted for publication.
May 27, 2009 Alejandro Perdomo was awarded the Dudley Herschbach Teaching Award for his work in teaching Chemistry 160. Congratulations to Alejandro!
May 27, 2009 Our paper with Michele Ceotto and Sule Atahan on Multiple coherent states semi-classical dynamics was accepted today in the Journal of Chemical Physics!
May 27, 2009 Today Alejandro , Salvador and Alan put up a new version of the Sombrero adiabatic quantum computation paper in the arxiv e-print server. Get it here
Cesar posted the videoabstract to the paper title Quantum Stochastic Walks and is now available in HD. Go check it out!
May 18, 2009 We uploaded our paper Quantum stochastic walks: A generalization of classical random walks and quantum walks to the arxiv e-print server. Great job César and James!
May 18, 2009 Our paper on Preparation of Many Body States for Quantum Simulation was just published online here: Journal of Chemical Physics. 130, 194105 (2009)
May 18, 2009 Our paper on the Role of Quantum Coherence in Chromophoric Energy Transport has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B!
May 11, 2009 Our paper on Time-dependent current density functional theory for open quantum systems was just published as an advance online article in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics. It was selected as a HOT ARTICLE!
May 9, 2009 Our paper on First-principles semi-classical dynamics with Michele Ceotto, our great Italian collaborator and amigo appeared online in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics on March 24, 2009. Update: The paper now has a full reference.
May 8, 2008 We posted our paper Towards quantum chemistry on a quantum computer on the arxiv e-print server. This is a great collaboration with the group of Andrew White in Australia (famous for many things including explaining the vision of shrimp). The Australian side of the effort was spearheaded by Ben Lanyon, whom we still have to meet in person, but of whom we have seen many pictures in Facebook.
May 5, 2009 Our work was featured in Shtetl Optimized, Scott Aaronson's blog. Check it out.
April, 2009 Welcome to postdoctoral researchers Dmitrij Rappoport, Kenta Hongo, and Mark Watson. We also warmly welcome David Tempel, a graduate student who joins us from the Physics department.
April, 2009 Alejandro Perdomo has been awarded a Certificate of Distinction for Excellence in Teaching for fall semester courses. Ivan Kassal and Leslie Vogt were awarded this Teaching Distinction last spring. Congratulations to all!
April 30, 2009. This week was amazing for the lab. Alan became a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Also, we found out that the Energy Frontier Research Center for Excitonics will be funded. Our group is a member of this Center.
April 30, 2009 The webserver is back up in its new home! Thanks to the great team of FAS Research computing for their great effort in moving the server.
April 24, 2009 Alan was interviewed in The Sceptical Chymist, a Nature.com blog.
March 31, 2009 A new video of Alan talking about the Clean Energy project. appeared in the IBM World Community Grid website: Watch it here.
March, 2009 Our paper Time-Dependent Current Density Functional Theory for Generalized Open Quantum Systems was accepted by the journal Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics, and chosen as a Hot Article! Congratulations to Joel and Cesar.
March 4, 2008 Our paper First-Principles Semiclassical Initial Value Representation Molecular Dynamics was accepted for publication in the journal "Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics"!
March 3, 2009 Our paper Environment-Assisted Quantum Transport was just published!
Feb 16, 2009 Alan was just listed as a 2009 Sloan Research Fellow. We thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for their support.
Feb 2, 2008 Our Paper on "Environment-Assisted Quantum Transport" was just accepted in the New Journal of Physics! Great news. Also, we were mentioned in the cover article of Discover magazine for this work on quantum effects in photosynthetic complexes. We will add a "Press" section to list our press appearances in this website soon.
December 7, 2008. The Clean Energy Project has been covered by the Financial Times.
Dec 5, 2008 We launched today our Distributed computing project , the Clean Energy Project on IBM's World Community Grid Please sign up and help us find new renewable energy materials!
Nov 20, 2008 Our group made it to the Harvard Gazette!. Here are the links to the news: Harvard Gazette, Eurekalert, Science Daily.
Nov 17, 2008 Our paper on quantum dynamics on a quantum computer was accepted by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper will appear online next week, and a press release is going to come out from Harvard this Thursday!
Nov 6, 2008 Our Paper on Environment-assisted quantum walks in Photosynthetic complexes was published online in the Journal of Chemical Physics!
October 15, 2008 One of our papers was just accepted in a great journal. More later. Great news.
Oct 2, 2008 We have been awarded an NSF CDI (Cyberdiscovery Inititiative) award to develop the concept of scalable heterogeneous computing! In particular, we are going to work on the use of video graphics cards for electronic structure calculations. This project is in collaboration with Lincoln Greenhill (Center for Astronomy) and Hanspeter Pfister (SEAS and Initiative in Innovative Computing). We are setting up a website for the collaboration, stay tuned!
Sep 23, 2008 Our paper on environment-assisted quantum walks was accepted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Physics.
Sep 23, 2008 We welcome Roel Sigifredo Sanchez-Carrera as a new postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory, holding a Mary Fieser Postdoctoral Fellowship award . Welcome Roel!
August 25, 2008 We welcome Anna Shin as our new laboratory administrator! Welcome Anna!
August 4, 2008 We welcome Cesar A. Rodríguez-Rosario as our new group member. César comes from the group of E. C. G. Sudarshan! Welcome, César.
August 4, 2008 Talk about interdisciplinary research. Our article on On the construction of model Hamiltonians for adiabatic quantum computing and its application to finding low energy conformations of lattice protein models was published in Physical Review A, 78, 012320 (2008) and then subsequently selected for three virtual journals! The Virtual Journal of Biological Physics Research, Vol 16, Issue 2, (2008), the Virtual Journal of Quantum Information, Volume 8, Issue 7 (2008), and the Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science and Technology, Volume 18, Issue 4 (2008)
August 1, 2008 We welcome Dr. Semion Saikin as the new postdoctoral fellow of the group.
Jul 17, 2008 A press release on our work on Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy was released by Harvard SEAS.
July 12, 2008 Alan Spoke at the CTTC V conference in Cracow, Poland, and will speak at the American Conference of Theoretical Chemistry next week.
July 12, 2008 Our paper on Environment Assisted Quantum Transport just appeard on the Arxiv e-print server.
July 12, 2008 Our paper on Adiabatic quantum computation for protein folding was just published in Phys. Rev. A!
July 4, 2008 We have two new papers in the arxiv e-print server: The Role of Quantum Coherence in the Chromophoric Energy Transfer Efficiency and Sombrero adiabatic quantum computation. In the first paper, we theoretically quantify the role of coherence in the recent experiments of Engel and Fleming in the Fenna-Mathews-Olson complex. The second paper introduces a new approach for carrying out adiabatic quantum computing when partial information of the problem might be available via a classical algorithm.
July 4, 2008 Our GPGPU paper is the sixth-most accessed paper in Journal of Physical Chemistry A in Jamuary-March, 2008!
July 1st, 2008 Semion Saikin will join us to work in our Fundamentals of Surface-Enhanced Raman project. This project is a DARPA-funded effort in collaboration with Professors Ken Crozier (SEAS) and Eric Mazur (SEAS)> We are excited of having Semion with us starating in August 2008!
Jun 16, 2008 A summary of Alan's two recent talks at UNAM (one about research and one about his perspectives on Chemistry) was published in the Gaceta de la Facultad de Química. Click to download.
June 16 and 17, 2008 Alán will participate at the 2008 Computational Mathematics and Electronic Structure Worshop held at Urbana-Champaign.
June 11, 2008 Our paper on obtaining molecular spectra using quantum computers by Huang, Kais, Aspuru-Guzik and Hoffman was accepted for publication in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics , a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
June 10, 2008 We look forward to receiving Cesar Rodriguez from the University of Texas and Roel Sigifredo Sanchez-Carrera from Georgia Tech as Mary Fieser Postdoctoral Fellows in July 1st and September 1st respectively!
June 10, 2008 Roberto Olivares Amaya was awarded a travel award from MCC (UIUC) to attend the summer school on TDDFT at Benasque, Spain.
Jun 9, 2007 Our paper on adiabatic quantum computation for protein folding was accepted by Physical Review A . Hopefully it appears in print soon!
May 30, 2008 Our paper in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy about Thai pigments was just published online.
May, 2008 We received a gift from Microsoft Research of 50,000 towards our research. Thank you, Microsoft!
May, 2008 Leslie Vogt was awarded the Dudley Herschbach Teaching Award!! Congratulations Leslie!
April, 2008 We begin April, 2008 with many happy successes:
- Leslie Vogt obtained an NSF graduate fellowship
- Masoud Mohseni got an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship
- Alejandro Perdomo obtained an outstanding teaching fellow award.
- Our paper in Physical Review A, "Direct Estimation of single and two qubit Hamiltonians" was accepted for publication!
- We will begin work on Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy under sponsorship from DARPA really soon!
March, 2008 The GPGPU conference that we organized with RIKEN was a success. Go to the site
March, 2008 We await the arrival of Ville Bergholm from Finland as a new postdoctoral researcher.
March, 2008 We welcome Sangwoo Shim, Roberto Olivares and Joel Yuen as the next generation of Aspuru-Guzik Jedi intellectual warriors.
Feb 20, 2008 Many different talks: In 2008, Alan gave talks at UIUC, UCSB, UNM and Los Alamos National Laboratory , and Roberto and Leslie gave talks at CONSOL 2008 the Mexican Open source conference in Mexico City.
Feb 19, 2008: We made it into the GPGPU.org website!
January 28, 2007: The paper "Accelerating Resolution-of-the-Identity Second Order Moller-Plesset Calculations with Graphical Processing Units" has been published online at JPC A. For more info., see Publications
Nov. 1, 2007 We welcome Joel Yuen as a rotation student. Our paper on the acceleration of quantum chemistry calculations using general-purpose graphics cards was accepted in JPC A.
September 10, 2007 We welcome Sangwoo Shim as a rotation student.
September 6th, 2007 Alan gave the Physical Chemistry seminar at the Chemistry department of Georgia Tech .
Summer Presentations: This summer, Alan gave presentations at the Mexican summer school of quantum compuation, the Towler Institute Conference in Quantum Monte Carlo in Vallico Soto, Italy, and at the Quantum Monte Carlo conference in CECAM, Lyon, France.
August 20-23 2007 ACS Meeting in Boston, MA Please come and see our 8 posters and two talks at the ACS meeting!
- Does Nature perform quantum algorithms?
  Masoud Mohseni(1), Ivan Kassal(1), Patrick Rebentrost(1), Ali Najmaie(1), and Alán Aspuru-Guzik (1),
  (1) Harvard University
- Air-stable, high performance, rigid thiophene-derivative organic semiconductors
  Joshua Schrier (1), Sule Atahan (2), Lin-Wang Wang(2), and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(2),
  (1) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  (2) Harvard University
- Using Web 2.0 in a student-centered approach to teach quantum mechanics to graduate students
  Thomas A. Baker(1) and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(1),
  (1) Harvard University.
- Quantum dynamics on quantum computers,
  Ivan Kassal(1), and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(1),
  (1) Harvard University.
- The role of quantum coherence to energy transfer efficiency in molecular systems: Characterization, simulation, and control,
  Masoud Mohseni(1) and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(1),
  (1) Harvard University.
- Punching holes in density functional theory: Toward a novel nonlocal exchange-correlation functional,
  Leslie Vogt(1), Ali Najmaie(1), Carlos Amador-Bedolla(1), and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(1),
  (1) Harvard University.
- Molecular power spectra from ab initio semiclassical dynamics,
  Michele Ceotto(1), Sule Atahan(2), and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(2),
  (1) University of Milan, Italy.
  (2) Harvard University.
- Simulated second-quantized time evolution for molecular electronic structure with quantum computers
  James D. Whitfield(1), Masoud Mohseni(1), and Alán Aspuru-Guzik(1),
  (1) Harvard University.
- Electron pair localization function: Toward a theoretical electrophilicity scale for Theoretical Chemistry,
  Department of Chemistry, Chemical Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, and Alán Aspuru-Guzik, aspuru@chemistry.harvard.edu, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138.
- Electronic and optical properties of nanostructures: (1) Optics of biosensing nanostructures; (2) Non-local density functional theory
  Department of Physics and Institute for Optical Science, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A7, and Alán Aspuru-Guzik, aspuru@chemistry.harvard.edu, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA 02138. Optical schemes ...
Summer of 2007 So many things happened. Expand this section later.
June, 2007 Joshua Schrier (LBL), Sule and Alan submit a paper about a novel material for organic field effect transistor applications.
June 10, 2007: We welcome Patrick Rebentrost, Sean Kermes, Justin Bae and Evan Thatcher as summer researchers in the laboratory!
May 19, 2007 We welcome our summer visitor, Jacob Biamonte, formerly with D-Wave Systems and a future Oxford graduate student. He will be working with us on quantum simulation and quantum computation until October.
May 19, 2007: A couple manuscripts are in preparation and others are in the works for the summer.
May 1st, 2007 A feature article about our group appeared on the Gaceta UNAM, the newspaper of the Autonomous University of Mexico. It can be downloaded here.
April 25, 2007 Alan presented the P-Chem Physical Chemistry Seminar at Purdue University.
March 14, 2007 Alan gave a 2-hour tutorial at the Greater Boston Theoretical Chemistry Lecture series.
March 8, 2007 Michael Wan accepts RISE Fellowship to be an intern in Berlin this summer. He will be working with Jorge Numata. Congratulations Michael!
February 14, 2007 James Whitfield delivered a keynote presentation on Scientific Programming with Python at the 2007 Mexican Open Source conference!
February 13, 2007 Alan attends the announcement of D-Wave systems's 16 quantum bit device. He appears on their video. Click here to watch Alan
January 22-28, 2007 Alan gives a lecture series on quantum Monte Carlo and one on quantum Computing at the University of Cali, Colombia. He met his new friends and collaborators, Julio Cesar Arce and John Henry Reina. He spent a lot of time at Unicentro.
January 22, 2007 Bittersweet news: As Ivan Tubert-Brohman leaves, Professor Carlos Amador Bedolla, and Laura Dominguez arrived to the group! Carlos is going to finish Ivan's secret project, and Laura is going to work with Sule in the Renewable Energy secret project.
December 15, 2006 The Zori code is available for download (version 1.1).
December 15, 2006 Ivan Kassal, Alejandro Perdomo, Leslie Vogt, and James Whitfield officially joined the group.
Nov 27, 2006 Alan gives a talk at the quantum information science seiminar at M.I.T. at 4.00 PM. in 26-214.
Nov 1, 2006 The first paper from the group was submitted. A collaboration with Professor Carlos Amador-Bedolla and Jose Alfredo Vázquez from UNAM, and Romelia Salomón and William Lester from UC Berkeley led to the development of a method for gauging the chemical reactivity of nitrogen lone-pairs.
Nov 1, 2006 Ali Najmaie arrived to Boston.
Oct 30, 2006 Masoud Mohseni started working in the group!
Sep 25, 2006, 1.00 PM Alan will speak at the Group meeting of Farhi group at MIT about quantum emulation.
Sep 15, 2006 We welcome our rotation students: Ivan Kassal, Alejandro Perdomo and Leslie Vogt.
Sep 7, 2006 We became part of the Harvard Center for the Environment.
Aug 25, 2006 The clandestino cluster completed its first 40-way calculation.
Aug 18, 2006 Kinga Partyka officially became the first graduate from the group. She finished her summer research under the Research Experience for Undergraduates program here at Harvard. She worked on the quantum phase estimation of eigenvalues of quantum dot model systems. We collaborated with Michael Stopa, from the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS).
Aug 9, 2006 Dr. Ivan Tubert-Brohman arrived to the group as a postdoctoral reseracher. He was formerly a student of William Jorgensen at Yale. He began his studies right away, and populated his shelves with precious food items such as TLC crackers and Progresso pasta soup.
Aug 9, 2006 5.30 PM Alan will speak at Pracqsys 2006. Thanks to Navin Khaneja for the invitation.
Aug 18, 2006 Alan will speak at the "CONSOL 2006":(http://www.consol.org.mx) conference in Mexico City, Mexico.
Aug 1, 2006: The Aspuru-Guzik group members will be attending the Pracqsys 2006 workshop held here at Harvard.
Jul 26, 2006: The cluster will arrive next week. Angstrom Microsystems will provide a free cooling system for us. The internal group wiki site is up.