Project description
Mapping the motion of two electrons
When molecules absorb high-energy radiation, they eject electrons. This process triggers chemical reactions in the atmosphere and within human cells. Sometimes, radiation releases two electrons at once or excites them together. Current quantum computational methods struggle to describe these phenomena. As most existing methods only track single electrons or simple atoms, complex molecular changes remain a mystery. The ERC-funded UNBOUND TWO project addresses this gap by building new quantum chemistry methods to describe how two free electrons move in sync. The focus is on ‘doubly excited states’, which cause rare chemical reactions. The aims to help scientists interpret data from advanced experiments. The findings are bound to improve our knowledge of how radiation changes the world around us.
Objective
UNBOUND TWO aims to develop the quantum chemistry methods that are needed to interpret next-generation spectroscopy involving two or more unbound electrons and to understand chemical reactions involving unbound doubly-excited states.
Emerging spectroscopies can probe correlations between two electrons, which is fundamentally impossible with techniques that probe only one electron. To gain information about electronic and molecular structure from such spectra, theoretical modeling is key. However, existing methods are able to deal with only one emitted electron or they are geared toward atoms. As a result, the full potential of spectroscopy is not yet realized for molecules.
Electron attachment accompanied by electronic excitation can mediate unique chemical reactions that attachment to the ground state does not support, for example the cleavage of OH bonds. Theoretical modeling is essential to harness such reactions, but existing methods struggle with the pivotal unbound doubly-excited states so that electron-induced chemistry is still at an early stage.
Building on recent breakthroughs for nonradiative decay in which only one electron becomes unbound, we will investigate processes in which two or more electrons are at play, for example in Auger and Coster-Kronig cascades and in dissociative electron attachment and dissociative recombination. To achieve these goals, we will advance the quantum chemistry of unbound electrons substantially. We will develop methods that treat singly-excited and doubly-excited states evenhandedly and describe the correlated motion of two emitted electrons. In computational applications, we will study the interaction of organic molecules and transition-metal compounds in gas phase and solution with ionizing radiation and free electrons over an energy range from <0.1 to >1000 eV.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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3000 Leuven
Belgium
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