School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 31-40 of 151 Results
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Thomas Markland
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur research centers on problems at the interface of quantum and statistical mechanics. Particular themes that occur frequently in our research are hydrogen bonding, the interplay between structure and dynamics, systems with multiple time and length-scales and quantum mechanical effects. The applications of our methods are diverse, ranging from chemistry to biology to geology and materials science. Particular current interests include proton and electron transfer in fuel cells and enzymatic systems, atmospheric isotope separation and the control of catalytic chemical reactivity using electric fields.
Treatment of these problems requires a range of analytic techniques as well as molecular mechanics and ab initio simulations. We are particularly interested in developing and applying methods based on the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics to include quantum fluctuations such as zero-point energy and tunneling in the dynamics of liquids and glasses. This formalism, in which a quantum mechanical particle is mapped onto a classical "ring polymer," provides an accurate and physically insightful way to calculate reaction rates, diffusion coefficients and spectra in systems containing light atoms. Our work has already provided intriguing insights in systems ranging from diffusion controlled reactions in liquids to the quantum liquid-glass transition as well as introducing methods to perform path integral calculations at near classical computational cost, expanding our ability to treat large-scale condensed phase systems. -
Brendan Patrick Marsh
Ph.D. Student in Applied Physics, admitted Autumn 2018
BioBrendan Marsh is a Ph.D. candidate in Professor Benjamin Lev’s research group at Stanford University. He investigates light-matter interactions in many-body quantum systems and explores their use as a computational resource. His work more generally includes experimental quantum optics and theoretical methods to describe open quantum systems. He received a master’s degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge in 2018 and a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Missouri in 2017.
Besides quantum optics and computation, Brendan has worked on problems in the philosophy of quantum theory (with Jeremy Butterfield at the University of Cambridge) and single molecule biophysics (with Gavin King at the University of Missouri). Along with Gavin King, he invented the Hessian blob algorithm, a general-purpose machine vision algorithm which is finding applications in fields ranging from scanning probe microscopy to medical imaging.
