The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is beginning a four-year collaboration exploring the use of high-performance computing (HPC) to drive innovation around nonequilibrium quantum materials.
This collaborative effort, Controlled Numerics for Emergent Transients in Nonequilibrium Quantum Matter (CONNEQT) will create an interdisciplinary research program to transform how scientists model and understand the complex behaviors and processes that happen when quantum materials are out of balance. Joining ORNL are researchers from Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Nonequilibrium quantum materials have their quantum mechanical properties and behaviors driven out of balance by external stimuli such as light pulses, electrical or magnetic fields, or temperature changes. Understanding nonequilibrium quantum materials is important for uncovering their potential applications in energy-relevant technologies like quantum computing, information technologies and microelectronics. In real world applications, materials are constantly subjected to external stimuli such as heat, energy flow, light, or magnetic pulses, and for that reason not in equilibrium. Understanding their out-of-equilibrium behavior is therefore crucial for real-world applications. Non-equilibrium environments can also expose entirely new material properties that often lay hidden in equilibrium, and which can potentially be harnessed in applications.
"Driving these materials out of equilibrium to manipulate the delicate balance between their complex interactions has emerged as a powerful strategy to engineer quantum phenomena on demand," said Thomas Maier, a distinguished research staff and section head for Advanced Computing Methods for Physical Sciences in the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at ORNL.
Despite remarkable progress in experiments studying how these quantum materials behave out of balance, significant gaps remain in the theories and computer models used to predict their behavior over long time periods and distances. CONNEQT is meant to fill those gaps by using leadership-class exascale supercomputers to power advanced modeling techniques that factor in the complex interactions between particles in unconventional superconductors and quantum spin liquids (or quantum magnets).
"By leveraging leadership-class exascale computing, we aim to revolutionize computational modeling of transient emergent behavior in quantum materials with strong many-body interactions and deliver a new fundamental understanding of nonlinear quantum phenomena," Maier said.
Over the next four years, the CONNEQT team will work toward three main research goals: developing a controlled and unbiased computational framework to study how systems of interacting electrons behave when driven by external forces; using mathematical tools and computer science methods to accelerate advanced modeling of complex dynamical systems; and harnessing leadership supercomputers to better understand how interactions between electrons create complex behaviors and patterns in nonequilibrium quantum materials.
This type of research has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery in HPC-powered quantum materials research and lead to advances in future energy technologies.
These collaborations will be supported by the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program funded by DOE's Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research and Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering. Frontier, the world's first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier and housed at ORNL, is a target platform for implementations of the new algorithms that will be developed and will be used to perform the simulations.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science . - Mark Alewine
