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【凝聚态物理-mg4355vip检测中心论坛 2025年第14期(总625期)】Development and Application of First-Principles Statistical Mechanics Methods for Studying Carbon-Bearing Supercritical fluids
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主讲人: 潘鼎 教授(香港科技大学)
地点: 物理大楼中212报告厅
时间: 2025年5月29日(星期四)下午15:00-16:30
主持 联系人: 陈基 ji.chen@pku.edu.cn
主讲人简介: Prof Ding Pan obtained BS in physics in the 00 Class (SCGY) at University of Science and Technology of China in 2005, and ScD at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011.  During the ScD study, he was a visiting researcher at the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany and a Thomas Young Centre Junior Research Fellow at the University College London, UK. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Davis (2011-2014) and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago (2014-2016) before he joined HKUST in 2016.  His achievements have been recognized by multiple awards from international scientific organizations, including Croucher Innovation Award in 2018, Deep Carbon Observatory Emerging Leader Award in 2019, Excellent Young Scientists Award in 2020 (Hong Kong and Macau, Natural Science Foundation of China), and HKUST School of Science Research Award in 2022.

Combining first-principles methods with statistical mechanics is very important for accurately modeling molecules and materials under finite temperature and pressure, which closely match real-world experiments and natural environments. Here, through efficient first-principles molecular dynamics simulations and enhanced sampling techniques, we discovered that molecules related to life, such as glycine, ribose, urea, and uracil analogs, can form in C-H-O-N supercritical fluids. Additionally, our findings explain why ribose in RNA molecules adopts a five-membered ring structure rather than the more stable six-membered ring observed under ambient conditions. Furthermore, we developed first-principles Markov state models to elucidate the reaction mechanisms and dynamics of CO2 dissolved in supercritical water, both in bulk and under nanoconfinement. Unlike previous simulations using enhanced sampling methods, our approach employs unsupervised machine learning techniques to automatically identify complex reaction coordinates and pathways involving multiple intermediates, without relying on prior assumptions. Our study provides valuable insights into the reaction kinetic network of aqueous carbon, yielding significant implications for the deep carbon cycle and the sequestration of CO2. Considering that our simulations are all conducted under thermal equilibrium conditions, we recently proposed a deep learning variational model that can directly generate a temperature-differentiable canonical ensemble. This model can be combined with any explicit density generative model to obtain the system's partition function without notable bias. Our new method achieves accuracy comparable to Markov chain Monte Carlo but is more efficient.