Quantum Transport and Dynamics in Superconducting Quantum Materials

Research Project, 2024 – 2027

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.