Benjamin Cohen-Stead
I am a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), and am based out of the Institute for Advanced Materials & Manufacturing (IAMM). My position at UTK was created after receiving the Scientific Software Research Faculty (SSRF) award from the Simons Foundation, and my work focuses on the development of open-source software tools for the condensed matter physics (CMP) research community. Prior to switching to my current position, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Steve Johnston’s research group at UTK after receiving my PhD from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Davis.
More broadly, my research interests focus on developing and applying novel numerical methods to address CMP problems and bridge the gap between theory and experiment. I am also interested in investigating opportunities to supplement standard numerical methods in CMP with machine learning approaches to accelerate existing computations and infer additional information from the high-dimensional data sets generated in studies of quantum materials.
My recent development efforts have focused on applying quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods to study model Hamiltonians meant to describe various quantum materials. This includes developing well-documented and user-friendly open-source QMC software packages to make these algorithms more accessible to the broader CMP community.
Session
The SmoQySuite organization maintains a growing suite of Julia packages for solving low-energy effective models of strongly-correlated quantum materials. Our organization specifically focuses on developing quantum Monte Carlo related tools for solving model Hamiltonian systems. SmoQySuite pursues a modular development philosophy, enabling users to interface with its suite of packages at various levels of complexity. This allows us to provide useful tools to a large community of researchers.