2024 New's Items

Research Seminar - Prof. Omar Yaghi

May 3, 2024
"How Chemistry Will Solve the Climate Problem, Fast!" How can chemistry swiftly address the climate crisis? Join us as we explore the transformative power of manipulating molecules with precision to create porous materials capable of carbon capture and water harvesting from desert air. Additionally, discover how genAI and ChatGPT expedite material discovery and broaden accessibility in this enlightening seminar. Omar Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global...

Omar Yaghi honored with Fiat Lux Faculty Award

February 23, 2024

Fiat Lux Faculty Awards a faculty member whose extraordinary contributions go above and beyond the call of duty to advance the university’s philanthropic mission and transform its research, teaching, and programs. One award will be given each year.

Molecular weaving makes polymer composites stronger without compromising function

March 21, 2024

Yaghi Research Group and collaborators discovered how to leverage both porosity and molecular weaving to make polymer composites stronger, tougher, and more resistant to fracture.

James Analytis Awarded the 2024 Bakar Prize

March 4, 2024

The Bakar Prize is designed to give a boost to campus innovators as they translate their discoveries into real-world solutions.

Kwabena Bediako awarded 2024 Philomathia Prize

March 11, 2024

The Philomathia Prize is intended to recognize exceptional early career faculty members at Berkeley great distinction and promise in their academic field.

Programmable Heisenberg interactions between Floquet qubits

Nguyen LB
Siddiqi I
2024

The trade-off between robustness and tunability is a central challenge in the pursuit of quantum simulation and fault-tolerant quantum computation. In particular, quantum architectures are often designed to achieve high coherence at the expense of tunability. Many current qubit designs have fixed energy levels and consequently limited types of controllable interactions. Here by adiabatically transforming fixed-frequency superconducting circuits into modifiable Floquet qubits, we demonstrate an XXZ Heisenberg interaction with fully adjustable anisotropy. This interaction model can act...

The chemistry of energy efficient electronics

April 2, 2024

Kwabena Bediako is using his expertise in chemistry and physics to design new magnetic and electronic crystals and new ways of storing energy from renewable sources.

New Technique Paves the Way for Energy-Efficient Electronics and Quantum Computing

April 9, 2024

Scientists in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division have taken the first atomic-resolution images and demonstrated electrical control of a chiral interface state – an exotic quantum phenomenon that could help researchers advance quantum computing and energy-efficient electronics.

Accelerating Chemistry Discoveries With Automation

April 8, 2024

A research team led by Kristin Persson, director of Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, has developed an automated workflow that could accelerate the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs and other useful products by enabling real-time reaction analysis from a desktop computer instead of in a lab and identifying new chemical-reaction products within a few hours instead of days.

Phonon-Driven Femtosecond Dynamics of Excitons in Crystalline Pentacene from First Principles

Cohen G
Qiu DY
Neaton JB
2024

Nonradiative exciton relaxation processes are critical for energy transduction and transport in optoelectronic materials, but how these processes are connected to the underlying crystal structure and the associated electron, exciton, and phonon band structures, as well as the interactions of all these particles, is challenging to understand. Here, we present a first-principles study of exciton-phonon relaxation pathways in pentacene, a paradigmatic molecular crystal and optoelectronic semiconductor. We compute the momentum- and band-resolved exciton-phonon interactions, and use them...