The leading renewable energy sources suffer from inconsistent production levels. Solar panels don't generate power at night or during cloudy days and winds turbines rely on unpredictable weather. This is a major disadvantage compared to fossil fuels, which can be burned on demand. The answer is engineering better energy storage materials that will provide a buffer between the production and consumption.

Electronic structure, governed by the Schrodinger equation, is one of the key determinants of a material's energy storage performance. Oftentimes physical experiments are expensive, time consuming, or difficult to perform and must be complemented with numerical simulations. Question: how many bytes are required to store the wavefunction of a 10 electron system on a small 10x10x10 grid? Spoiler: way too many! In this talk I will present an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics called Density Functional Theory and discuss practical numerical methods for electronic structure simulations. Speaker(s): Nathan Vaughn (University of Michigan)