Quantum Dynamics and Spectroscopy of Functional Molecular Materials and Biological Photosystems

Les Houches Summer School 2023

Edited by Irene Burghardt, Jeffrey Cina, Jérémie Léonard

This volume presents a collection of lectures at the frontier between ultrafast spectroscopy and molecular quantum science, which were held in 2023 as part of a summer school at the Ecole de Physique at Les Houches, France. In the first four chapters, a combined experimental and theoretical perspective is developed, including the concepts of ultrafast optics and two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy, along with the theoretical interpretation of nonlinear spectroscopic signals relying on state-of-the-art simulation approaches in quantum molecular dynamics. The next two chapters present an overview of applications to light harvesting in photosynthesis and excitonic processes in organic photovoltaics. The two final chapters pedagogically summarize the material of computational exercises on quantum dynamical simulations and the computation of linear and nonlinear spectroscopic signals, with Jupyter notebooks made available together with this volume.