Achievement

Extended systems in one-, two-, or three-dimensions, be they polymers, surfaces, or extended structures, are a meeting ground of chemistry and physics. Both communities have thought about the way atoms are held together in these extended structures, the structural choices made, and the properties that follow. Prof. Roald Hoffmann developed an educational module entitled “From Bonds to Bands, and Back Again” that provided IGERT Fellows and other interested students and faculty an intuitive theoretical translation between the chemists’ ideas of atom centered molecular orbitals, and bonds, and the physicists’ natural language for the electronic structure of the same states of matter, often rooted in perturbed free electron models, and using band structures and densities of states.