Earle K. Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy & Dynamics (2020): New Developments in Many-Body Electronic Structure Inspired by Advances in Experimental Light Science

New light sources greatly expand our ability to interrogate the matter, but decoding the message delivered by the spectra is far from trivial. How do we convert the spectra into what the nuclei and electrons are doing? The theoretical modeling provides a way to so. This lecture will discuss new and old challenges faced by the theory in the context of modeling electronic structure in strong fields, high-energy, and non-linear regimes and highlight recent progress in many-body methodology in treating spectroscopic signatures of core-level states.