Quantum Transport and Dynamics in Superconducting Quantum Materials

Recent scientific discoveries have produced several new classes of materials and heterostructures with very interesting properties, either related to strongly correlated electron physics or topology. Examples cover high-temperature superconductors and two-dimensional materials beyond graphene.

A common theme is strong spin-orbit coupling and/or electron-electron interactions pushing the electron system to be close to a phase transition, either of Landau-Ginzburg or of topological type.

In this project we will explore the electronic transport properties of these quantum materials in device geometries, including contacts to outside reservoirs, with a focus on superconducting quantum materials.

A substantial part of the project is development of our existing state-of-the-art simulation tools and computational strategies: 1) SuperConga, a solver for the quasiclassical theory of superconductivity in 2D geometries, massively parallelized on graphics cards (GPUs) and published as open source code; 2) Finite element methods for more easily generalizable codes running on CPUs parallelized by MPI; 3) for going beyond quasiclassics, a non-equilibrium Green’s function based quantum transport solver utilizing a knitting algorithm for tight-binding Hamiltonians for general geometries and arbitrary number of leads, running on CPUs with MPI.

An important part will be to extend state-of-art to time-dependent driven systems, starting with linear response.