- Structure and properties of atomic clusters
- Nuclear structure
- Computational quantum many-body systems
Research Projects
​Quantum many-body correlations play an important role in describing a large variety of systems including atomic cluster and atomic nuclei. These diverse areas of research share similar techniques, such Density Functional Theory (DFT) and its applications, coupled-cluster (CC) techniques and configuration interaction (CI) techniques. These techniques require large computational resources that we developed during the last years in the Department of Physics at CMU. One important physical property of these small systems is their shape, which for some sizes differs significantly from one would naively expect: a compact shape. In addition, in some cases, cucumber-like and pie-like shapes coexist (have similar binding energies) with the compact shapes. For atomic clusters we have developed the Big-Bang algorithm, a novel techniques for finding the optimal arrangements of the atoms in a cluster of given size. This work is funded by National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, and CMU.