Condensed Matter Theory & Statistical Mechanics
Faculty
Research
We study strongly fluctuating systems with a large number (e.g., Avogadro’s number!) of degrees of freedom. These include quantum many-body problems, “soft” phases of matter, and biological systems. The quantum phenomena we study include superconductivity and magnetism; quantum phase transitions, in particular metal-insulator and magnetic transitions; and transport theory. The soft systems include liquid crystals; complex fluids; slender flexible structures (e.g. polymer chains, a sheet of paper, or a ping-pong ball); macromolecular liquids and mixtures, and their phase separation through coarse-graining and multiscale modeling; and mechanical metamaterials. The biological systems include flocks, evolving populations, epidemics, trees, proteins, nucleic acids, and protein/nucleic acid complexes.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation grants 2145766-DMR and 1665466-CHE, and the American Chemical Society grant 61648-ND6.
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