Strongly correlated electrons
To answer why matter behaves the way it does we need to understand how macroscopic physics emerges from the microscopic laws describing the motions of electrons and atoms. Naturally, things become interesting if particles interact strongly and their collective behavior is starkly different from the behavior of individual constituents. The strange laws of quantum mechanics describing electrons and atoms add some additional spice, but also complexity to this endeavor. I am studying fundamental models describing the physics of interacting electrons to understand how different states of matter emerge. This includes the stripe and pseudogap physics of the hole-doped Hubbard model at finite-temperature which I studied using a tensor network technique called METTS.
Superconductivity, charge density waves and antiferromagnetism are
prominent features of cuprate high-temperature superconductors. The
basic mechanisms of these materials are believed to be described by
one of the most fundamental models in solid-state physics, the
Hubbard model. While several analytical and numerical techniques
approach the problem from the high-temperature limit, tensor network
methods, like the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) have
been used to study ground state properties of the system. Even
though tensor network methods alongside other approaches have closed
in on an understanding of the ground state
physics
