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I am entering my 4th year of the Natural Sciences Tripos studying Chemistry, and completed a summer project in the Thom group in 2016. I worked on applying self-consistent field (SCF) metadynamics and non-orthogonal configuration interaction (NOCI) to systems which undergo electron transfer.

Many electron transfer reactions are nonadiabatic phenomena, meaning they cannot be adequately described under the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Prediction of their rate constants requires a good description of the relevant diabats - electronic states that don't change character as the nuclear configuration varies. Fortunately SCF (Hartree-Fock/DFT) states often behave somewhat diabatically, and SCF metadynamics has made it much easier to locate them. Applying NOCI to these "quasidiabats" recovers, approximately, the adiabatic stationary states. 

Publications

On the "Matsubara heating" of overtone intensities and Fermi splittings
RL Benson, SC Althorpe
– Journal of Chemical Physics
(2021)
155,
104107
Path-integral studies of quantum statistical effects in vibrational spectroscopy
RL Benson
(2021)
Which quantum statistics-classical dynamics method is best for water?
RL Benson, G Trenins, SC Althorpe
– Faraday Discussions
(2020)
221,
350
Zero-point energy and tunnelling: general discussion.
SC Althorpe, AM Alvertis, W Barford, RL Benson, I Burghardt, S Giannini, S Habershon, S Hammes-Schiffer, S Hay, S Iyengar, A Kelly, K Komarova, J Lawrence, Y Litman, C Martens, RJ Maurer, D Plant, M Rossi, K Sakaushi, A Schile, S Sturniolo, DP Tew, G Trenins, G Worth
– Faraday discussions
(2020)
221,
478
Modeling Electron Transfers Using Quasidiabatic Hartree–Fock States
KT Jensen, RL Benson, S Cardamone, AJW Thom
– J Chem Theory Comput
(2018)
14,
4629

Undergraduate student

Telephone number

01223 763872 (shared)