Preface of The 2014 International Workshop on Frontiers of Theoretical and Computational Physics and Chemistry

The 2014 International Workshop on Frontiers of Theoretical and Computational Physics and Chemistry (WFTCPC'14) was held in Quzhou, China, on August 21-24, 2014, hosted and coordinated Professor Feng Long Gu of South China Normal University, Professor Ruiqin Zhang of City University of Hong Kong, and Professor Guoqiang Wu of Quzhou University. The challenges to physics and chemistry lie in three aspects: the accuracy, the size, and the time scale. Both theoretical physics and chemistry have enjoyed rapid advances in these contexts and provided great impact on essentially all aspects of experiments. However, theoreticians of the two intimately related disciplines seldom talk to each other. They even do not share the common languages. From the very beginning of the development theoretical chemists have been trying to solve the quantum mechanical equations as accurately as possible, while theoretical physics have been playing with various simplified physical models for obviously complex systems. However, the situations are now being changed in that theoretical chemists also start to look at systems of increasing complexity. Whereas theoretical physicists may want to learn from theoretical chemists about better accuracy, theoretical chemists certainly have to learn from physicists about the true physics. The very first motivation of the series of workshops entitled Frontiers of Theoretical and Computational Physics and Chemistry is to provide a unique forum for theoretical physicists and chemists such that mutual understanding will soon be reached. The second motivation is of course to create mutual collaborations and thus push the frontiers further. The third but not least motivation is to strengthen the interplay between theoreticians and experimentalists. The objective of this annual series of workshops is to enhance the dialogue between theoretical physicists and chemists. The workshop this year focused on Electron correlation and excitation and related topics. During the four-day workshop, we have two keynote talks (50min each) by Professor Lin and Professor Kirtman; 21 invited talks (30min each, by invitation), and two contributed talks (20min each, by application and nomination, for young people), together with eight poster presentations. These talks and posters cover the main development in the field happened in the past a few years. Therefore, we collect 22 talks with authors permission to publish the abstracts in the Journal of South China Normal University (Natural Science Edition). For more detailed information about this series of Workshops, please visit the following website: http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/apcms/WFTCPC/.