Sandro Sorella

Biography

Sandro Sorella has been a professor in physics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, since 2005 and a senior visiting scientist at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, since 2013. His scientific activity has been devoted to the study of strongly correlated electron systems by advanced numerical simulation techniques based on quantum Monte Carlo, and has covered several topics, such as quantum spin liquids, high-temperature superconductivity, hydrogen at high pressures and several carbon-based compounds, such as graphene and nanotubes. He has developed several efficient algorithms for describing the ground state properties of correlated systems, from the auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo during his Ph.D. (1989), to stochastic optimization methods (stochastic reconfiguration in 1998) for variational Monte Carlo and the alleviation of the so called ‘fermion sign problem.’ Moreover, starting in 2008, he has been the pioneer developer of efficient molecular dynamics and structure optimization methods for the electronic simulation of material properties by quantum Monte Carlo.

Research Interest

Strongly correlated systems: variational description of entangled states of matter: Mott insulators, spin liquids and high temperature superconductors Realistic simulations of electronic systems by a novel correlated method: from small molecules to the simulation of liquid hydrogen at high pressure and water at ambient conditions. Realistic description of high temperature superconductors by a fully ab-initio, wave function based approach. Ab-initio methods for strongly correlated systems by quantum Monte Carlo approaches and high performance supercomputers.