Fireside chats for lockdown times

Density-functional theory has become a very popular and very powerful approach to the calculation from first-principles of the properties of molecules and materials. In these three talks, Nicola Marzari provides a gentle introduction 1) to the fundamentals of density-functional theory, 2) to the calculations that can be done with modern, open-source codes such as Quantum ESPRESSO, and 3) to its capabilities and limits. A typical target audience would be scientists (e.g. experimental colleagues) that want to learn more about what is possible and what is good for this kind of calculations (and what is not possible, and what is not good).



The second talk is complemented by a simple tutorial that can be done on any desktop or personal computer, independently of the operating system used (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux), thanks to the Quantum Mobile virtual machine (for this tutorial we use the release 20.03.1). All the tutorial material is available on Github