You are cordially invited to the fifth lecture in SCL Lecture series on complexity which will be held on Monday, 18 November 2024 at 18:00 in the small lecture hall of the Kolarac Endowment. The talk entitled

Battle with complexity in the physics of high-temperature superconductivity

will be given by Dr. Jakša Vučičević (Institute of Physics Belgrade). The abstract of the talk:

Theoretical physics of solid state materials commonly represents a description of electrons in a crystalline lattice, a physical system consisting of a large number of atoms, arranged periodically in space. In many cases, theory can be reduced to the description of a single electron in an effective static field; however, to understand the materials that exhibit superconductivity at high temperatures, it is believed that one must take into account all the electrons (or at least a larger number of them). As electrons are ruled by the laws of quantum mechanics, this presents one of the hardest problems in all of physics. In this lecture, we will review different approaches to the solution of the quantum many-body problem arising in the theory of high-temperature superconductors. We will illustrate the complexity that lies at the root of this problem and its extraordinary difficulty, and show how it manifests in different ways in numerical calculation of various physical quantities. We will cover the approach of perturbative expansions and Feynman diagrams, Monte Carlo summation, linear response theory, embedded cluster methods, and the issues of the fermionic sign problem, analytic continuation and finite-size effects.

The complete lecture series schedule: