And now, "he has developed and demonstrated the accuracy of an innovative approach that brings him much closer to the holy grail than anyone has managed to get before," Herschbach said.
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student working with the encouragement of Herschbach at Harvard in the late 1990s. It's a problem that Mazziotti first tackled as a Ph.D. "That quest has been a 'holy grail' of theoretical chemistry for more than 50 years," Herschbach said. But during the 1950s, scientists realized that they could, in principle, use only a pair of electrons to represent any number of electrons accurately. There can be hundreds or even thousands of electrons moving around the nuclei of a molecule-far too many for their distribution in the molecule to be determined exactly even with modern supercomputers. The importance of electrons in these and countless other chemical phenomena have led scientists since the 1950s to seek an efficient way to determine the distribution of electrons in atoms and molecules. The behavior of electrons in atoms and molecules affects many significant chemical reactions that govern everyday phenomena, including the fuel efficiency of combustion engines, the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, and the design of new medicines. Professor of Science at Harvard University. "In his new paper, David Mazziotti has made a major advance in fundamental theory," said Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach, the Frank Baird Jr. 6 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. He presented the details of his method in the Oct. Newswise - University of Chicago chemist David Mazziotti has developed a new method for determining the behavior of electrons in atoms and molecules, a key ingredient in predicting chemical properties and reactions.