This school will be the fourth event of a series that started in 2018 with the First International School on Electron-Phonon Physics from First Principles (International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste), and continued with a virtual event in 2021, the Virtual School on Electron-Phonon Physics and the EPW Code, and an in-person event in 2022, School on Electron-Phonon Physics from First Principles (The University of Texas at Austin). The original schools mainly focused on introducing electron-phonon physics and the EPW code. In 2022, the school was expanded to introduce excited-state phenomena and the BerkeleyGW code.
The aim of this school is to train graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty members, and research scientists in modern approaches to the physics of electron-phonon interactions and many-body perturbation theory, from the point of view of predictive ab initio calculations for real materials.
The interaction between electrons and phonons is responsible for the temperature dependence of many electronic and optical properties of solids, and plays a important role in technologically important phenomena, from charge and heat transport to superconductivity and light-driven phase transitions. Meanwhile, electron-electron interactions shape the quasiparticle, optical, and excitonic properties of materials. As research in computational materials science and data-driven materials discovery continues to grow in size and scope, there is an increasing need for advanced conceptual and computational tools to study functional properties with predictive accuracy. In this context, calculations of electron-phonon interactions, excited states, and related materials properties are becoming more widely adopted in materials design and discovery.
This school will introduce participants to advanced ab initio calculations of electron-phonon physics and many-body perturbation theory approaches including the GW and GW-Bethe-Salpeter-equation (GW-BSE) through lectures on many-body quantum theory, software implementations, and hands-on training sessions. Practice sessions will be based on the EPW, Quantum Espresso, Wannier90, and BerkeleyGW codes. Lectures and tutorials will be held virtually from Monday, June 5th, to Friday, June 9th, 2023. A virtual poster session will be held on Wednesday, June 7th. Training sessions will be held on the supercomputers of the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Accepted participants will be asked to pay a nominal registration fee of $10, which will be used to sponsor prizes for best posters. Participants from low-income countries can request a fee waiver in the application form.
Applicants who are PhD students will be asked to upload a brief reference letter form their PhD advisor in the application form.
The school is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Materials Research (DMR) and Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), under awards 2007638 and 2103991, by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under Award DE-SC0020129 and DE-AC02-05CH11231, by the DOE Center for Computational Study of Excited-State Phenomena in Energy Materials (C2SEPEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and by the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Support from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (reservation of Frontera nodes & technical assistance) is gratefully acknowledged.
