Research Interests
The dynamics and thermodynamics of quarks and gluons inside hadrons, electrons and holes in quantum wires, atomic nuclei in macro-molecules share several important common features, despite the huge gap in the energy scales involved, which ranges from meV to GeV.
In particular all these systems present a variety of so-called non-perturbative many-body phenomena - such as e.g. phase transitions, or collective excitations-. These phenomena cannot be described effectively in terms of quasi-free degrees of freedom.
Clearly, the same theoretical physics tools can be applied to physical systems which display analogies in their phenomenology. In particular, in our research, we combine theoretical and computational techniques including e.g. functional calculus, quantum and statistical field theory, renormalization group approaches, molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations.
A list of past and ongoing projects can be found by clicking on the following links:
Two very different examples of “instantons” of the same type of those obtained in our research: the movie on the left represents the time evolution of a protein during the folding reaction (the so-called dominant reaction pathway, or stochastic instanton). The movie of the right represents the (imaginary time) evolution of the gauge field fluctuations in the vacuum of quantum chromodynamics (the so-called QCD instantons).
