Botana group
Computational Condensed Matter Physics
Research interests
A few keywords describing our research interests are...
Computational Tools
Density-functional theory
Density-functional theory (DFT) is a computational workhorse throughout the entire computational condensed matter and material science community. DFT is a beautiful effort to solve the realistic many-body problem for a real solid by mapping the intractable interacting problem to a completely fictitious non-interacting problem using only the charge density to connect the fictitious system to the real system.
Dynamical mean-field theory
It turns out that the DFT does not capture some of the physics in strongly correlated materials, because the wavefunctions of open shell d- and f-electrons are much more localized. Dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) is a non-perturbative method to treat local interactions dynamically. This consists of mapping the many-body lattice problem onto a local impurity problem. DMFT can be coupled with DFT methods as a better computational framework to capture the physics of strongly correlated materials.
