The focus of this theoretical research is on strongly correlated systems, together with courseware development and the dissemination and documentation of research related codes. The research will involve the continued development of cluster mean field techniques and will focus on unconventional superconductors such as the cuprates and organic superconductors, the effect of disorder, spin-orbit coupling and correlations in the spintronic material GaMnAs, and the effect of non-local correlations on exhaustion and ferromagnetism in heavy Fermion materials. The related calculations will be carried out on massively parallel computers. Related scientific courseware will continue to be developed. Scientific and educational results will be readily accessible on the web.
The research addresses areas of significant scientific and social impact. Superconductivity has important applications, such as medical diagnostic equipment and ultra-high-performance electronic communication filters. Many more uses are possible if the transition temperatures are high enough. Ferromagnetic semiconductors have great promise for the development of spintronic devices where both the electronic charge and spin are used in devices with new functionalities. The role of exhaustion and origin of ferromagnetism in heavy Fermion materials remain topics of great interest and even controversy. The cluster mean field formalism being developed has broad applications from correlated ordered systems to disordered materials.
Apart from the publication of results in physics journals, the impact of this research is enhanced through the development of new computational algorithms with broad applications, and more directly through the distribution of examples of these codes on the PI's website and on public repositories of scientific software such as the MCC Software Archive. Distributed codes include Maximum Entropy codes for analytic continuation, and dynamical mean field and dynamical cluster Quantum Monte Carlo codes.
Education is heavily integrated into this project, both through the support of graduate students, encouraging them to attend meetings, and more importantly through the development of NSF-sponsored courseware distributed on the website. Two complete courses are available, which are used to teach both upper-level undergraduate courses as well as introductory graduate courses in Solid State Physics and Electrodynamics. In addition to the usual materials, these courses emphasize modern computational techniques.
Courseware that demonstrates the most basic use of computers in science is being developed for middle and high school. Inner-city public school teachers who participate in the "Physics by Inquiry" programs at Cincinnati will learn to use it during the summer, and bring it back to their students in the fall, assisted by NSF-supported graduate students. %%% The focus of this theoretical research is on strongly correlated systems, together with courseware development and the dissemination and documentation of research related codes. Education is heavily integrated into this project, both through the support of graduate students, encouraging them to attend meetings, and more importantly through the development of NSF-sponsored courseware distributed on the website. Courseware that demonstrates the most basic use of computers in science is being developed for middle and high school. ***
