Nonlinear Transport in Two-dimensional Quantum Materials 124 views

Condensed matter physics is a rich field with a wide variety of phenomena. In condensed matter, we consider systems composed of many electrons and nuclei, with the only fundamental interaction being electromagnetism. Nuclei of a given charge and mass are considered as point particles. The relevant fundamental physics that we use as our foundations is the quantum many-body problem. That is, just standard many-body quantum mechanics, but formulated in terms of a useful second quantized field theory, which can deal with an arbitrary number of particles within a single Hilbert space. In general, this many-body problem is essentially intractable for numbers of particles as large as those we must consider for materials. Thus we must look for simplifications and look at easily measurable aspects which allow us to make predictions still. We employ the trick of phrasing the questions differently. Rather than look at the time evolution of an arbitrary many-body wavefunction for the fundamental degrees of freedom, we look at transport in scenarios where the starting point is a relatively simple assumed equilibrium state of the material, consisting of a ground state with postulated quasiparticle excitations.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

English

2026-08-01