Physics (Internal)

Summer Student Seminar

This event is part of the Graduate Student Council Events.

Jonathan Wurtz (CMT)
A User Guide to Exponential Complexity

One of the fundamental challenges for quantum many-body physics is the scaling of computational difficulty with system size. For N spins 1/2, one must naively deal with 2^N degrees of freedom, which rapidly becomes intractable. This talk will give a broad overview of some of the common methods to deal with this challenge. Starting from exact reductions such as symmetries and integrability, I will end with semi-classical methods such as phase space and mean-field theory, covering a few things in-between.