The nonequilibrium many-body problem is one of the hardest problems to solve in quantum mechanics. A Georgetown led team including Prof. Freericks and Postdoctoral Fellow Karlis Mikelsons worked with Prof. Hulikal Krishnamurthy from the Indian Institute of Science to develop a new method for solving this problem based on what is called strong-coupling perturbation theory. The work was recently published in Physical Review Letters. With this numerically intensive method, the team was able to show how a Mott insulator thermalizes in the presence of a large amplitude dc electric field.

Profs. Jim Freericks and Veljko Zlatic have shown in a recent Physical Review Letters that a lightly doped Mott insulator may be an ideal material for building a thermoelectric refrigerator. A thermoelectric cooler uses electrons as the refrigerant and small refrigerators are commercially available. But it has been difficult to achieve cooling with such devices much below room temperature.

Adam Keith, an undergraduate from North Carolina State University, has been named a finalist in the 2012 LeRoy Apker award competition of the American Physical Society. This award recognizes the best undergraduate researchers in all fields of physics. Adam Keith worked with Prof. Freericks in the summer of 2011 as part of the Department's REU program. He continued to work on the project over the coming year and also in the summer of 2012. Adam has had this work published in Nature and Physical Review Letters in collaboration with an experimental group at NIST (Boulder).

Prof. Jeff Urbach was recently named the inaugural Interdisciplinary Chair in Science at Georgetown University. This endowed chair is funded by a gift to Georgetown University from an anonymous donor, and recognizes the close research collaborations that Jeff has developed with colleagues in other departments. Additional information is available at Interdisciplinary Chair