The hybrid halide perovskite CH3NH3PbI3 has enabled solar cells to reach an efficiency of about 20%, demonstrating a pace for improvements with no precedents in the solar energy arena. Despite such explosive progress, the microscopic origin behind the success of such material is still debated, with the role played by the organic cations in the light-harvesting process remaining unclear. Here van der Waals-corrected density functional theory calculations reveal that the orientation of the organic molecules plays a fundamental role in determining the material electronic properties. For instance, if CH3NH3 orients along a (011)-like direction, the PbI6 octahedral cage will distort and the bandgap will become indirect. Our results suggest that molecular rotations, with the consequent dynamical change of the band structure, might be at the origin of the slow carrier recombination and the superior conversion efficiency of CH3NH3PbI3.

Organic-inorganic lead-halide perovskites have received a revival of interest in the past few years as a promising class of materials for photovoltaic applications. Despite recent extensive research, the role of cations in defining the high photovoltaic performance of these materials is not fully understood. Here, we conduct nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations to study and compare nonradiative hot carrier relaxation in three lead-halide perovskite materials: CHNHPbI, HC(NH)PbI, and CsPbI. It is found that the relaxation of hot carriers to the band edges occurs on the ultrafast time scale and displays a strong quantitative dependence on the nature of the cations. The obtained results are explained in terms of electron-phonon couplings, which are strongly affected by the atomic displacements in the Pb-I framework triggered by the cation dynamics.

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Considering recent advancements and successes in the development of efficient quantum algorithms for electronic structure calculations—alongside impressive results using machine learning techniques for computation—hybridizing quantum computing with machine learning for the intent of performing electronic structure calculations is a natural progression. Here we report a hybrid quantum algorithm employing a restricted Boltzmann machine to obtain accurate molecular potential energy surfaces. By exploiting a quantum algorithm to help optimize the underlying objective function, we obtained an efficient procedure for the calculation of the electronic ground state energy for a small molecule system. Our approach achieves high accuracy for the ground state energy for H2, LiH, H2O at a specific location on its potential energy surface with a finite basis set. With the future availability of larger-scale quantum computers, quantum machine learning techniques are set to become powerful tools to obtain accurate values for electronic structures.

Designing quantum algorithms for simulating quantum systems has seen enormous progress, yet few studies have been done to develop quantum algorithms for open quantum dynamics despite its importance in modeling the system-environment interaction found in most realistic physical models. In this work we propose and demonstrate a general quantum algorithm to evolve open quantum dynamics on quantum computing devices. The Kraus operators governing the time evolution can be converted into unitary matrices with minimal dilation guaranteed by the Sz.-Nagy theorem. This allows the evolution of the initial state through unitary quantum gates, while using significantly less resource than required by the conventional Stinespring dilation. We demonstrate the algorithm on an amplitude damping channel using the IBM Qiskit quantum simulator and the IBM Q 5 Tenerife quantum device. The proposed algorithm does not require particular models of dynamics or decomposition of the quantum channel, and thus can be easily generalized to other open quantum dynamical models.

We treat an analytically solvable version of the "Hooke's Law" model for a two-electron atom, in which the electron-electron repulsion is Coulombic but the electron-nucleus attraction is replaced by a harmonic oscillator potential. Exact expressions are obtained for the ground-state wave function and electron density, the Hartree-Fock solution, the correlation energy, the Kohn-Sham orbital, and, by inversion, the exchange and correlation functionals. These functionals pertain to the "intermediate" density regime (r,) 1.4) for an electron gas. As a test of customary approximations employed in density functional theory, we compare our exact density, exchange, and correlation potentials and energies with results from two approximations. These use Becke's exchange functional and either the Lee-Yang-Parr or the Perdew correlation functional. Both approximations yield rather good results for the density and the exchange and correlation energies, but both deviate markedly from the exact exchange and correlation potentials. We also compare properties of the Hooke's Law model with those of two-electron atoms, including the large dimension limit. A renormalization procedure applied to this very simple limit yields correlation energies as good as those obtained from the approximate functionals, for both the model and actual atoms.

In this review, we present and discussed the main trends in photovoltaics with emphasize on the conversion efficiency limits. The theoretical limits of various photovoltaics device concepts are presented and analyzed using a flexible detailed balance model where more discussion emphasize is toward the losses. Also, few lessons from nature and other fields to improve the conversion efficiency in photovoltaics are presented and discussed as well. From photosynthesis, the perfect exciton transport in photosynthetic complexes can be utilized for PVs. Also, we present some lessons learned from other fields like recombination suppression by quantum coherence. For example, the coupling in photosynthetic reaction centers is used to suppress recombination in photocells.

The scaling of the Schrödinger equation with spatial dimension D is studied by an algebraic approach. For any spherically symmetric potential, the Hamiltonian is invariant under such scaling to order 1/D2. For the special family of potentials that are homogeneous functions of the radial coordinate, the scaling invariance is exact to all orders in 1/D. Explicit algebraic expressions are derived for the operators which shift D up or down. These ladder operators form an SU(1,1) algebra. The spectrum generating algebra to order 1/D2 corresponds to harmonic motion. In the D→∞ limit the ladder operators commute and yield a classical-like continuous energy spectrum. The relation of supersymmetry and D scaling is also illustrated by deriving an analytic solution for the Hooke’s law model of a two-electron atom, subject to a constraint linking the harmonic frequency to the nuclear charge and the dimension.