Understanding Strong Electronic Correlations - Antoine Georges

From copper-oxide superconductors to rare-earth compounds, materials and quantum systems with strong correlations have focused enormous attention over several decades. Solid-state chemistry, new elaboration techniques and improved experimental probes are constantly providing us with examples of novel materials with surprising electronic properties. A new frontier of the field has also opened up with the study of ultra-cold atomic gases in optical lattices.

Understanding Strong Electronic Correlations: Recent Progress from Dynamical Mean-Field Theory

By Antoine Georges (Collège de France and École Polytechnique).

20 - 21 October 2016

Lecture programs and colloquiums at Uppsala University, Stockholm University Alba Nova and Nordita. 

In this lecture, Antoine Georges (Collège de France and École Polytechnique) reviewed some salient physical aspects of strong electronic correlations. He emphasize that the classic paradigm of solid-state physics, in which electrons form a gas of wave-like quasiparticles, must be seriously revised for strongly correlated materials. Instead, a description accounting for both atomic-like excitations in real-space and quasiparticle excitations in momentum space is requested. He reviewed how Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) fulfills this goal. This approach has led to significant advances in our understanding of materials with strong electronic correlations.

On the more mathematical side, surprising connections between the physics of black holes and the structure of theories closely related to DMFT have recently emerged.

At Uppsala University

Antoine held a 3.0 hour discussion with 10 members of the materials research and theory group, including around dynamical mean field theory were covered, in an intense and fruitful discussion. Several fruitful ideas came out of this discussion.

After lunch, Antoine was given a tour of the university's high-field laser lab at Ångström laboratory. The visit was hosted by members of the Division of Atom, Molecular and Solid State Physics.

Antoine then gave a 1.5 hour presentation at Polheimsalen to about 50 students and faculty, and the presentation was very well received. The talk described novel phenomena in materials that interact with a strong electromagnetic field, where experimental results were first described and subsequently theory based on density functional theory in the time-domain, was used to explain the observations.