Connor Box
Contact: connor.box.1@warwick.ac.uk
Connor Box, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Connor's work aims to contribute to the development of methods that enhance our understanding of the interplay of light with chemical reactions on metallic surfaces. These are of particular interest as they provide route towards more efficient industrial processes using renewable energy sources. Metallic surfaces pose a significant challenge to current simulation methods due to the apparent breakdown of the oft applied Born Oppenheimer approximation from the coupling of nuclear motion to the electronic degrees of freedom. An efficient approach is to treat this coupling as a drag experienced on the nuclear coordinates, this is known as electronic friction. This method is always applied with its own approximations, the consequences of many are not well understood and may limit the systems that it is applicable to. Connor hopes to more rigorously define the limits of electronic friction theory and analyse these approximations.