Department of Chemistry
University of Reading
Whiteknights
Reading RG6 2AD
Stuart Carter obtained his BSc in honours Chemistry at Sheffield University (UK) in 1963. He continued working there with John Murrell in the field of Theoretical Chemistry, and obtained his PhD in 1963 with a Thesis which covered the electronic structure and spectra of Charge-Transfer complexes.
After two years of Post-Doctoral research, he joined ICL, the UK-based computer company (now a subsidiary of Fujitsu), where he worked as a programmer in the FORTRAN Division. He remained with ICL until 1976, when he renewed his academic collaboration with John Murrell (Sussex, UK), working on the construction of potential energy surfaces for two-, three- and four-atom molecules. In 1984, he was co-author of the book `Molecular Potential Energy Functions'.
It was during his research on potential energy surfaces that he struck up collaborations with Ian Mills (Reading, UK) and Nicholas Handy (Cambridge, UK), when his interests turned to the variational calculations of rovibronic spectra of small polyatomic molecules. Since 1980, he has concentrated on this field of research, collaborating almost exclusively with Nick Handy, and has published in excess of 45 publications on the topic. His most notable works in this field have been on H2O, HCN, NH2, H2CO, H2O2, NH3 and H2C2, for which accurate potential energy surfaces have been constructed, and whose spectra have been calculated variationally using the exact kinetic energy operator in internal Valence coordinates. His work on NH2, in particular, was the first time that exact calculations on this classic Renner-Teller system had been carried out. His work on HCN, H2CO and H2C2 has provided definitive geometries and forcefields for these important molecules.
From 1988 to 1992, he had several collaborations in Germany, notably with Wilfried Meyer (Kaiserslautern) with whom he wrote a triatomic variational program in hyperspherical coordinates for the study of the rovibrational spectrum of H3+ and the rovibronic spectrum of Jahn-Teller systems such as Na3 clusters. More recently, in 1996, he collaborated with Paolo Palmieri (Bologna, IT) on the construction of a 3-state triatomic variational program, covering Renner-Teller and Jahn-Teller interactions for electronic singlet or doublet states. In 1996, he visited Emory University to start a new collaboration with Joel Bowman on vibrational SCF theory, and this collaboration gave birth to `Multimode'. He has continued this collaboration to the present day.
