伊桑·哈塔米 Awarded RUI Grant

伊桑·哈塔米 has been awarded $171,000 to explore theoretical research in the physics of disorder and its effect on how electrons organize in real materials. 调查 of fundamental 属性 of solids that exhibit unexpected and often technologically useful 属性 at low temperatures commonly rely on the assumption that atoms form perfectly periodic lattices. However, disorder, which appears in form of crystal defects or impurities in real materials, cannot always be ignored when studying electronic 属性. Their presence can drive the system as a whole to phases that do not appear if 一个 considers interactions between electrons al一个.

The grant includes support for two undergraduate students and 一个 graduate student 参加博士. 哈塔米的研究. The students will be developing massively parallel codes implementing a novel idea for efficiently taking random disorder into account in state-of-the-art simulations of quantum many-particle systems, and will be running their programs on the High-Performance Computer (HPC) recently acquired through a NSF MRI grant of $900K, on which Dr. 哈塔米是副主席. Students will analyze results, contribute to writing papers, and travel to conferences to participate in disseminating results.

Those results will help interpret experimental observations, and will ultimately help us understand the mechanism behind some exotic behavior of solids, such as insulating and superconducting, with potential applications in the technology and energy sectors.

Illustration: Sampson Wilcox, MTI的消息, 2016年9月15日

2016