The Research Training Group

 

Overview and core ideas

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Many-body effects of quantum-mechanical nature lead to important collective phenomena in extended condensed matter systems, such as superconductivity and magnetism, but also play a crucial role in various meso- and nanoscopic systems. Quantum many-body physics constitutes a fascinating field of basic research with implications for applications. In this field, theoretical physics faces three challenges: (a) how to gain a deeper understanding of correlation effects and how to obtain (b) a more realistic as well as (c) a more precise description of the emergent phenomena.

These are the central issues we want to address within the Research Training Group with the ultimate goal of making an impact on the development of functional materials and nanoelectronics. Since the progress achievable through just one highly specialized modern quantum many-body method is limited, our research will systematically combine complementary techniques and exploit their synergy . One example is the combined application of ab-initio and strongly correlated methods to investigate modern materials and non-equilibrium quantum transport. A second example is the application of methods developed recently in quantum information science to many-body models. Method combination has already proved its power for selected problems but has not been pursued in the broad way as envisaged by the Research Training Group.

Modern quantum many-body methods, both analytical and numerical, are technically rather challenging and young researchers usually learn and apply only one method in their Master's and PhD studies. It is the goal of the Research Training Group that every graduate has first-hand research experience in the development and/or application of at least two such techniques . The Aachen-Jülich area with its many professorships and young investigator groups in the field of quantum many-body methods constitutes an ideal environment to set up a Research Training Group with this challenging aim and topic. We have broad research experience, international standing, and the teaching capacity to offer an extensive and demanding Research Training Group program. The expertise of the contributing researchers covers application-oriented ab-inito methods, numerical many-body approaches, non-equilibrium techniques, renormalization group methods, as well as quantum information based approaches.