Condensed matter physics concerns the study of macroscopic or mesoscopic materials properties from the microscopic point of view, focusing on systems with a large number of interacting degrees of freedom. These degrees of freedom may be associated to standard solid-state physics excitations or particles such as electrons, lattice ions, phonons, photons, etc, or may be associated to phenomenological models of hard or soft condensed matter such as vortex lattices in superconductors, domain walls in ferromagnetic or ferroelectric materials, amorphous solids such as foams or sand, leaves venation patterns, basalt columns, geological faults, etc.

Our research group has a long standing tradition performing theoretical studies of electronic and transport properties in a variety of condensed matter systems, such as strongly correlated electronic systems, magnetic systems and superconductors.

Currently, mesoscopic and nanoscopic systems, topological systems, out-of-equilibrium and disordered systems are also being studied. Moreover, using approaches from statistical physics and numerical methods, studies of magnetic domains and patterns, granular systems, fractures, vortices in superconductors and others are being addressed. The length scales studied in our group range from the nanometers to the kilometers (see figures above extracted from some of our publications or talks).

In particular, a variety of nanoscopic quantum systems are of interest, with potential technological applications, such as quantum dots, two-dimensional materials, self-assembled magnetic systems, spin chains, domain walls in ferromagnetic or ferroelectric materials, and superconducting qubits, among others.

The main research lines of the group are the following:

  • Theory of nanostructured systems
    • Correlated systems (AA, CB, PC, KH, CP)
    • Driven and out of equilibrium systems (AA,CB, DD, MS, GU)
    • Superconducting qubits (MS,DD)
    • Synthetic materials (GU)
    • Topological systems (AA,CB, PC,JF,GU)
  • Materials modelling
    • Design of new exchange and correlation functionals (CP, AH)
    • Disorder effects and defects in alloys and oxides compounds (MS, CV)
    • Electronic structure and magnetism of strongly correlated systems (PC, DG, KH, CP, JF, AA, CV)
    • Transport properties of new materials, oxides compounds and alloys (MS, CV)
    • Two-dimensional materials (CB, SB, CP, GU, AH)
    • Elastoplastic models (EF)
  • Statistical physics and condensed matter
  • Computational techniques
    • Ab-initio calculations, DFT (CP, JF, AH)
    • Molecular dynamics (EF)
    • Quantum and classical Monte Carlo (DG)
    • Dynamical mean-field theory, DMFT (PC, KH, JF)
    • Numerical renormalization, NRG, DMRG (PC, DG, KH)
    • Computational Physics on GPGPU (EF, AK, SB)
  • Equipment
    • A computing cluster with several hundred Xeon processor cores and twenty GPUs, mostly Nvidia RTX3080, RTX3070 and Tesla K20. Cluster nodes are racked and located in a data center at the Centro Atómico Bariloche. The cluster is part of the High Performance National System (SNCAD). (Sysadmin: Gustavo Berman)