The principal research objective of the Department of Condensed Matter Theory is a comprehensive microscopic description of electronic and atomic properties of solids, in particular of systems with a nontrivial complex structure of the elementary cell, broken or reduced translational symmetry or of systems in extreme conditions in or out of thermodynamic equilibrium. To reach this objective we extensively use advanced techniques of equilibrium and non-equilibrium classical and quantum statistical mechanics, many-body theory, Green's functions, large-scale first-principles calculations and numerical simulations. We aim at a qualitative understanding of collective phenomena in solids on a model level and a realistic quantitative description of behavior of real materials.
Research areas include:
Microscopic theory of electrons in solids from first quantum-mechanical principles (electron structure of complex materials, spectral, magnetic and transport properties of metals, semiconductors, and their alloys; physical properties of surfaces, interfaces and multilayers; electron correlations and quantum critical phenomena; nanoscale electron systems; nonequilibrium electron dynamics)
Statistical mechanics of interacting many-body systems (theory and numerical simulations of complex systems in and out of thermodynamic equilibrium; critical behavior and phase transitions in random and frustrated systems; dynamical fluctuations in irreversible processes; stochastic thermodynamics)
Development and application of modern numerical methods for large-scale computations and simulations in solids (density-functional and finite-elements methods; theory of pseudopotentials; dynamical mean-field theory; classical and quantum Monte Carlo simulations; exact numerical solutions on clusters)
