The Extreme Quantum Materials Alliance (eQMA) is pleased to present the Spring 2024 eQMA Distinguished Lecture:
Understanding and predicting the physical properties of strongly correlated electron materials
Gabriel Kotliar, Rutgers University
April 8, 2024
4:00-5:00pm
Brockman 101
Reception to follow
Dr. Kotliar is the Board of Governors Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University. He is the recipient of many honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences.
Abstract:
Electrons in solids can behave either as waves propagating independently of each other or as collective team players, resulting in emerging cooperative phenomena such as magnetism, metal-insulator transitions, and superconductivity, to name a few. In the latter case, we talk about strongly correlated materials systems where the wave function of the electron is fully itinerant or fully localized. These materials, which offer promising technological applications, raise fundamental science questions, as they display phenomena that cannot be accounted for by textbook solid-state physics. They also cannot be treated using perturbation theory in the Coulomb interactions.
This lecture will present at an elementary level accessible to a broad community [1] some ideas and methodology, Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT), that enabled significant conceptual progress in these areas. With these ideas at hand, we will group different types of correlated materials into different families; Mott systems, Heavy Fermions, and Hund metals, and discuss their physical properties qualitatively.
The combination of Dynamical Mean Field Theory and other quantum embedding methods with electronic structure methods, now enable material specific calculations that can be successfully compared with experiments. We will provide some examples and conclude with the challenges still facing the theory of strongly correlated electron materials, as well as the challenges of theory-assisted material design.