Semester: Fall

Offered: 2018

Graduate-level class in computational physics. Suitable for advanced undergraduates.

This course will introduce students to advanced state-of-the-art techniques in computational physics of fields and solids, covering ground-state and excited-state phenomena. This course will focus on transport methods including Boltzmann Transport Methods (and associated numerical challenges with 3D electron and phonon transport calculations), computational methods to study the electron-phonon interaction and finite temperature calculations. We will discuss and leverage GPU-accelerated computing for computational physics and materials calculations. This course will also intersect with computational electrodynamics with ab initio material response incorporated.

We will study electron-phonon interactions in solids from the point of view of ab initio calculations (including, but not limited to Wannier function methods and strategies for k-point sampling with large energy mismatch) and explore the origin of temperature dependence of optical spectra in direct and indirect-gap semiconductors, relaxation rates of photoexcited carriers and implications of excited-states in transport observed in quantum materials. The class with also cover recently discovered classes of quantum materials and describe these using single-particle and many-body computational techniques. Finally, we will cover linking electrodynamical and photonic calculations with intrinsic properties of quantum materials.