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04/16/2013

Makenzie Provorse wins MSI Research Exhibition poster prize

Research from Professor Jiali Gao's research group.

Fourth-year graduate student Makenzie Provorse was awarded a poster prize as one of the finalists in the 2013 Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) Research Exhibition, Thursday, April 11, 2013.

Makenzie presented her research on density functional theory simulation of singlet fission in a monolayer of pentacene molecules, a process that converts a singlet exciton into two triplet excitons. The process is of particular interest because of its potential to overcome the Shockley-Queisser limit to boost the power conversion efficiency of solar cells. To understand the mechanism of this process, Makenzie used a multistate density functional theory (MSDFT) to characterize the electronic coupling between a monomer-localized, singlet excited state and the spin-coupled, block-localized triplet excitons that has an overall singlet spin. Her poster highlighted the MSDFT method developed for charge transport and electronic coupling in condensed phases, and findings on the singlet fission mechanism. Makenzie's adviser is Professor Jiali Gao. Click here to see her research poster.

This was the fourth year that MSI held this event, featuring poster presentations on research performed using MSI computing facilities. Entrants were from a variety of disciplines, and posters were judged by a panel of MSI principal investigators in two categories, physical sciences and engineering, and biological and medical sciences.