Mechanochemical transduction enables an extraordinary range of physiological processes such as the sense of touch, hearing, balance, muscle contraction, and the growth and remodelling of tissue and bone. Although biology is replete with materials systems that actively and functionally respond to mechanical stimuli, the default mechanochemical reaction of bulk polymers to large external stress is the unselective scission of covalent bonds, resulting in damage or failure. An alternative to this degradation process is the rational molecular design of synthetic materials such that mechanical stress favourably alters material properties. A few mechanosensitive polymers with this property have been developed; but their active response is mediated through non-covalent processes, which may limit the extent to which properties can be modified and the long-term stability in structural materials. Previously, we have shown with dissolved polymer strands incorporating mechanically sensitive chemical groups-so-called mechanophores-that the directional nature of mechanical forces can selectively break and re-form covalent bonds. We now demonstrate that such force-induced covalent-bond activation can also be realized with mechanophore-linked elastomeric and glassy polymers, by using a mechanophore that changes colour as it undergoes a reversible electrocyclic ring-opening reaction under tensile stress and thus allows us to directly and locally visualize the mechanochemical reaction. We find that pronounced changes in colour and fluorescence emerge with the accumulation of plastic deformation, indicating that in these polymeric materials the transduction of mechanical force into the ring-opening reaction is an activated process. We anticipate that force activation of covalent bonds can serve as a general strategy for the development of new mechanophore building blocks that impart polymeric materials with desirable functionalities ranging from damage sensing to fully regenerative self-healing.

The standard model for photoinduced cis-trans isomerization about carbon double bonds is framed in terms of two electronic states and a one-dimensional reaction coordinate. We review recent work that suggests that a minimal picture of the reaction mechanism requires the consideration of at least two molecular coordinates and three electronic states. In this chapter, we emphasize the role of conical intersections and charge transfer in the photoisomerization mechanism.

We demonstrate that a video gaming machine containing two consumer graphical cards can outpace a state-of-the-art quad-core processor workstation by a factor of more than 180× in Hartree-Fock energy + gradient calculations. Such performance makes it possible to run large scale Hartree-Fock and Density Functional Theory calculations, which typically require hundreds of traditional processor cores, on a single workstation. Benchmark Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics simulations are performed on two molecular systems using the 3-21G basis set - a hydronium ion solvated by 30 waters (94 atoms, 405 basis functions) and an aspartic acid molecule solvated by 147 waters (457 atoms, 2014 basis functions). Our GPU implementation can perform 27 ps/day and 0.7 ps/day of ab initio molecular dynamics simulation on a single desktop computer for these systems.

The development of accurate molecular mechanics force fields is a significant challenge that must be addressed for the continued success of molecular simulation. We developed the ForceBalance method to automatically derive accurate force field parameters using flexible combinations of experimental and theoretical reference data. The method is demonstrated in the parametrization of two rigid water models, yielding new parameter sets (TIP3P-FB and TIP4P-FB) that accurately describe many physical properties of water.