This training school funded by EGU brings lead experts of atmospheric science and computational chemistry to picturesque Lausanne to share their knowledge on computational methods in studying atmospheric new particle formation. The school features 3 days of lectures and hand-on tutorials covering the most widely used and newest computational methods in the field. A poster session with competition is available for early career researchers.
Interested? Registration opens soon!
Need financial support? ECS researchers are invited to submit their request for partial or full refund of participation fees. Request form COMING SOON!
A short intro to new particle formation
Atmospheric new particle formation (NPF) – the process in which subnanometer molecular clusters grow to form stable aerosol particles – is extensively studied by means of computational chemistry at multiple scales. The interest in NPF that has generated decades of active research is rooted in its strong impact on climate, air quality and health.
The primary challenge in observing atmospheric NPF is linked to length scales. Molecular clusters grow into stable aerosol particles when their diameter exceeds 2-3 nm. This size falls into a gap between sizes detectable by experimental techniques used to study molecular clusters and those used to study the chemical composition of atmospheric aerosol particles. One promising solution to cover the missing size range is to resort to computational approaches. However, a number of challenges persist and a strong collaborative effort from experts of multiple domains of computational and atmospheric chemistry is needed to overcome them.
The variety of compounds involved in NPF and the complexity of cluster formation, stabilisation and growth calls for the use of different of computational methods: ab initio methods, combined Quantum Mechanics Molecular Mechanics (QMMM), reactive and classical molecular dynamics (MD) and metadynamics most recently combined with machine learning.