IMS Open Seminar by Prof. David E. Manolopoulos

Seminar & Events Detail

Lecture Title	Spin dynamics in radical pairs
Date	Thursday 2 October 2025 15:00 to 16:30
Lecturer	Prof. David E. Manolopoulos (University of Oxford, UK)
Place	Research Building Room 201
Abstract	Radical (and polaron) pair recombination reactions arise in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from how the electroluminescence of organic light emitting diodes changes in the presence of an applied magnetic field to how migratory songbirds use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate. The quantum mechanical Hamiltonian of a radical pair is straightforward to write down, but the resulting Schrödinger equation is extremely difficult to solve exactly for a radical pair containing a realistic number of hyperfine-coupled nuclear spins. During the last decade, we have developed new quantum and semiclassical methods to overcome this difficulty, derived improved quantum master equations to account for radical pair recombination and electron spin relaxation, and used these developments to perform a variety of radical pair spin dynamics calculations. This talk will review some of the highlights of our work in this area, culminating with a recent exact quantum mechanical calculation of the spin dynamics of a carotenoid-porphyrin-fullerene radical pair containing more than 40 nuclear spins that has been shown to be sensitive to an Earth-strength magnetic field.
Contact	Shinji Saito (Theoretical and Computational Molecular Science)

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