After the more gentle introductions last week during the first lectures at UHasselt, this week we dove into the deep end.
For the students of the second bachelor chemistry the course introduction to quantum chemistry dove into the postulates of quantum chemistry. They learned about the wave-function and operators, had their first contact with the mystics notation of quantum chemistry: the bra-ket notation. For the third bachelor chemistry, the course quantum and computational chemistry was centered around perturbation theory. In addition to the theory, we applied the method to the simple system of the infinite square potential.
The electron density in the primitive diamond unit cell.
In the master materiomics the course fundamentals of materials modeling was kicked into high gear, not only did the students learn the theory behind quantum mechanical modelling, they also had their fist experience on the supercomputers of the VSC. So in addition to the road from the standard Schrödinger equation to the Hohenberg-Kohn-Sham equations of DFT, they also traveled their first steps along the road from their somewhat familiar windows OS to the bash command-line environment of the HPC unix system.
Finally, as the course introduction into quantum chemistry is part of the preparatory program of the master materiomics, I started creating the narrated versions of those lectures as well (2h worth recording, corresponding to 4h of live lectures). As the available time is limited, we are going for single shot recordings which makes things exciting in that department as well.
At the end of this week, we have added another 7h of live lectures and 2h of video lectures, putting our semester total at 19h of lectures. Upwards and onward to week 3.
