This collaborative award facilitates scientific research using the large new computational resource named Blue Waters being developed by IBM and scheduled to be deployed at the University of Illinois in 2011. It provides travel funds to support technical coordination between the principal investigators, the Blue Waters project team and vendor technical team and a provisional allocation of supercomputing time on the system.
The proposed project is an investigation of the behavior of materials containing strongly correlated electron systems. Such materials often have interesting properties; for example, high-temperature superconductivity, colossal magneto-resistance, large optical nonlinearities and large thermoelectric coefficients. The project includes the adaptation to Blue Waters of a computer code to model such materials and an investigation of the electronic properties of novel, iron-based superconductors. The researchers will study the physics of short-range correlation effects and the itinerancy of the d-electron states. They will derive and study low-energy Hamiltonians for various pnictides, using them to study hopping integrals, exchange couplings, electron-phonon and magnon-phonon interactions, and determining trends in superconducting temperatures. The project team will also examine the competition between superconductivity and the Kondo effect.
The proposed work will add a valuable predictive tool for the study of strongly correlated materials including those with potentially interesting industrial applications. The techniques developed should be of broad applicability, and the code and methods developed will be made available to the broader scientific community. The project will include the teaching of complicated many body concepts of solid-state physics to students through the use of state-of-the-art numerical and computational techniques, enhancing the human infrastructure for materials science. The project team integrates research and education through the inclusion of students and post-doctoral researchers.
