Nonadiabatic Dynamics and Energy Dissipation at Metal Surfaces
Predictive first-principles models of electronic friction and nonadiabatic energy transfer at metal surfaces.
Why it matters
Understanding how molecules exchange energy with metal surfaces is central to catalysis, corrosion, hot-carrier chemistry, and nanoscale devices. Standard Born-Oppenheimer dynamics often misses the transfer of energy into low-lying electronic excitations, which means it can fail precisely when dissipation controls reactivity and relaxation.
What I’ve done
I have developed and applied electronic-friction-based approaches that resolve how energy loss depends on molecular mode, collision energy, and surface facet. This work has shown when room-temperature scattering benchmarks are insufficient, when nonadiabatic effects become quantitatively important, and how friction models can be made predictive from first principles rather than used phenomenologically.
What I aim to do in the future
In future I aim to extend these ideas toward chemically complex interfaces, realistic catalytic environments, and stronger coupling between theory and experiment. The goal is to build transferable nonadiabatic simulation strategies that can explain measured dynamics and guide the design of interfaces where energy flow is a controllable part of function.
(Box et al., 2020) (Litman et al., 2022) (Litman et al., 2022) (Zhang et al., 2022) (Box et al., 2024) (Stark et al., 2025)
