Scuseria elected to prestigious international academy
Rice chemist joins International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Rice chemist Gustavo Scuseria has been elected to one of quantum science’s most exclusive academic societies, the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS) in Menton, France.

The academy may not be a household name, but it is one of the most select in the physical sciences. It has inducted only 132 members in its 42-year history, and nearly 10 percent of those are Nobel Laureates, including luminaries like Louis de Broglie, Kenichi Fukui, Gerhard Herzberg, Roald Hoffmann, Linus Pauling, John Pople and Walter Kohn.

	GUSTAVO SCUSERIA

Scuseria, Rice’s Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry, professor of physics and astronomy, and vice chair of the Chemistry Department, said the news of his election to the academy came as a pleasant surprise, even though he knew he’d been nominated in the past.

“Their discussions are secret, and the voting is complex,” Scuseria said. “The results of the voting aren’t revealed. They just announce the new members that have been elected. It was a wonderful surprise to find out I’d been chosen.”

Scuseria’s got no shortage of honors to his name — he’s a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry — but he said the IAQMS election is special.

“It is more meaningful because it’s specific to my field, and in that sense it is direct recognition not just from my peers but also my competitors,” he said.

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Chemistry Department Chair Seiichi Matsuda said Scuseria’s intellectual horsepower and dedication have a profound influence in both the field of quantum mechanics and the department.

“Gus is a triple-barreled shotgun loaded with equal parts creativity, passion and intellectual rigor,” Matsuda said. “He solves problems that have befuddled others efficiently, rigorously and cleverly. This makes him a giant in quantum mechanics, a terrific leader in the department and the best asado grill man north of Argentina.”

At 52, Scuseria is one of the youngest members of the IAQMS, and he is one of the few U.S. members who are not yet a member of the U.S. National Academies, something that’s generated some good-natured joshing from his colleagues.

“Some of them have said, ‘Oh, the pressure is on. Now, you have to get elected to the National Academies,'” Scuseria said.

But for his part, Scuseria is less interested in awards and accolades than in the day-to-day research of quantum science. He said the thing that keeps him interested are the seeming contradictions and persistent mysteries that pervade quantum mechanics even today, some eight decades after it was first proposed.

“We know the equations. They’ve been around all this time,” he said. “But there are still things we cannot compute with them.”

As an example, he offers up a seemingly simple theoretical setup — 216 hydrogen atoms spaced equally apart in a cube. The atoms are the most simple, with just one electron apiece, but if they are squeezed together tightly enough — with the sort of pressure that exists deep inside a star, for example — the electrons start interacting and responding as a single coordinated metallic unit rather than mere individuals.

“If I want to calculate the wave function of the system, I have the equations — they’ve been around for 80 years — but the number of possible configurations is on the order of 10 to the 123rd power,” Scuseria said. “That number is so large it is greater than the number of neutrons, protons and electrons in the entire universe. What that means is that even though the equation tells me I can compute the answer, there is not enough matter in the universe to write it out.”

These types of “strongly correlated” interactions between electrons are not just theoretical. They are the driving force behind phenomena like superconductivity, and other types of electron interactions, which are equally mysterious, are also important in materials science, chemistry and biophysics.

Scuseria’s election to the IAQMS stems from the work he’s done over the past 30 years to develop new theoretical and computational approaches for these sorts of complex problems. In fact, many of the tools developed by his research group are now a part of the day-to-day tool set of computational quantum chemistry.

But Scuseria said the real fun isn’t in looking back at what’s already been done, it is searching for new answers. For instance, he’s working on a new approach to tackle the strongly correlated electron problem posed in the example above. It won’t provide the unwriteable answer, but it will allow scientists to get an approximate answer that is much more precise than ever before possible.

“Having someone in the department like Gus, who really excels at everything, raises the tempo for everybody else,” Matsuda said. “It makes everybody try to be that much better.”