David Masiello
Beginning in 2010 I am an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. Details of my research activities will soon be hosted on the UW Chemistry website.
From November 2006 to December 2009 I was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of George C. Schatz at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. My research involved the first-principles theory of surface-enhanced Raman scattering and its application to single-molecule spectroscopy. By extending many-electron Green's function methods to perturbatively include the coupling of a classical metal nanostructure supporting localized surface-plasmon excitations to a general quantum-mechanical molecular system in the presence of the external radiation field, I have developed and implemented a practical yet rigorous semiclassical description of the surface-enhanced Raman scattering effect that is general enough to treat other plasmon-enhanced spectroscopies as well. Applications of my work to the modeling of several recent experiments in the Van Duyne group can be found in my publications (see below).
From July 2004 to October 2006 I was a postdoctoral research associate in the group of William P. Reinhardt at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. There I modified and extended several first-principles methods of modern quantum chemistry and applied them, in new and interesting ways, to the many-body structure and dynamics of both simple and fragmented Bose-Einstein condensates of identical atoms.
In May of 2004, I completed a Ph.D. in theoretical Chemical Physics under the advisement of Yngve Öhrn at the University of Florida's Quantum Theory Project. My Ph.D. research explored a nonperturbative treatment of the complete interaction between an atomic or molecular system and the classical electromagnetic field. This work extends existing quantum-mechanical theories of reactive chemical processes to include the coupling to electrodynamics, thereby allowing energy to redistribute not only between different internal molecular degrees of freedom but also to be liberated to the dynamical electromagnetic field. My dissertation was entitled On the canonical formulation of electrodynamics and wave mechanics.
In May of 1999, I received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida. My undergraduate research involved the application of Hilbert transforms, a.k.a. Kramers-Kronig transformations, in optical dispersion theory. This theoretical work was done in collaboration with experimentalists from the University of Florida's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Teaching:
Research Interests:
My research focuses on the first-principles theoretical description of the many-body structure and dynamics of atomic and molecular systems and their interaction with the electromagnetic field.
Recurring themes involved in the description of the many-body structure and energetics of Bose and Fermi systems are:
- Many-body Green's function methods for both finite and infinite systems, and their interaction.
- Extension and application of linear response theory to surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS).
- Generalizing quantum-chemical methods to explore chemistry at ultracold temperatures.
- Hartree-Fock, configuration interaction, MCHF, and MCSCF.
Recurring themes involved in the explicitly time-dependent approaches to dynamics are:
- The time-dependent variational principle in quantum mechanics and electrodynamics.
- Electron-nuclear dynamics of reactive atomic and molecular collisions beyond adiabatic and Born-Oppenheimer approximations.
- Molecular-reaction dynamics in extreme environments.
- Time-dependent HF and time-dependent MCSCF theory of ultracold atomic matter waves.
Development of the software necessary to explore all of these theoretical concepts is an essential aspect of my research.
Recent Publications:
- D. J. Masiello and G. C. Schatz, On the linear response and scattering of an interacting molecule-metal system, Journal of Chemical Physics 132, 064102 (2010).
- J. A. Dieringer, K. L. Wustholz, D. J. Masiello, J. P. Camden, S. L. Kleinman, G. C. Schatz, and R. P. Van Duyne, Surface-enhanced Raman excitation spectroscopy of a single Rhodamine 6G molecule, Journal of the American Chemical Society 131, 849 (2009).
- D. J. Masiello and G. C. Schatz, Many-body theory of surface-enhanced Raman scattering, Physical Review A 78, 042505 (2008).
- J. P. Camden, J. A. Dieringer, Y. Wang, D. J. Masiello, L. D. Marks, G. C. Schatz, and R. P. Van Duyne, Probing the structure of single-molecule surface-enhanced Raman scattering hot spots, Journal of the American Chemical Society (Communications) 130, 12616 (2008).
- D. J. Masiello and W. P. Reinhardt, Symmetry-breaking self-consistent quantum many-body structure of high-lying macroscopic self-trapped and superposition states of the gaseous double-well BEC, under review.
- D. J. Masiello and W. P. Reinhardt, Time-dependent quantum many-body theory of identical bosons in a double well: Early-time ballistic interferences of fragmented and number entangled states, Physical Review A 76, 043612 (2007).
- D. Masiello, S. B. McKagan, and W. P. Reinhardt, Multiconfigurational Hartree-Fock theory for identical bosons in a double well, Physical Review A 72, 063624 (2005).
- D. Masiello, E. Deumens, and Y. Öhrn, On the canonical formulation of electrodynamics and wave mechanics, Advances in Quantum Chemistry 49, 249 (2005).
- D. Masiello, E. Deumens, and Y. Öhrn, Dynamics of an atomic electron and its electromagnetic field in a cavity, Physical Review A 71, 032108 (2005).
Email Address: masiello (at) chem (.) northwestern (.) edu
Office Location: 4023 Ryan Hall (formerly Nano)
Office Phone: (847) 467-4858
Fax: (847) 467-4996
Mailing Address:
Dr. David J. Masiello
Department of Chemistry
Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208-3113
Last modified: Thu Oct 1 15:12:49 CDT 2009