Student Assistant - Condensed Matter Physics

The Condensed Matter Physics Department is seeking a Part-Time - Student Assistant to work on the following project:

Tensor networks have emerged as a powerful tool to simulate quantum many-body systems in equilibrium at zero and finite temperature, but also for dynamical simulations of correlated quantum systems. The exponential thermal renormalization group (XTRG, Chen et al., PRX 2018) was introduced as a simple transparent approach for thermal simulations that traverses energy scales exponentially by doubling the Gibbs state with itself.

The project intends to explore a similar approach in the real-time domain. Benchmarks will be performed against Trotterization for short-ranged systems, but also for longer-range systems based on exact analytic solutions.

The employed toolbox is the open-source tensor library QSpace (v4) which is a highly optimized C++ library embedded into Matlab. With this, the coding can directly focus on the project within Matlab, yet with full access to physical symmetries for numerical efficiency. Hands-on familiarity with numerical quantum-many-body techniques and tensor network simulations is required, even if not with QSpace itself yet, thus likely requiring a senior graduate student.

The project duration is limited to 10 weeks starting mid June to align with summer interns at the Brookhaven National Laboratory for 2026.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• The candidate will familiarize themselves with tensor network setups within QSpace environment thorough understanding of XTRG (2018), to extend to real-time domain
• Develop proof of principle demonstrations and benchmark against conventional approaches
• Summarize results in paper

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Active enrollment in an undergraduate or graduate level degree program in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Materials Science or related. The candidate may not exceed 1 semester past graduation from their program.
• Hands-on experience on tensor network methods and algorithms
• General overall understanding of quantum-many-body systems in lattice models
• Significant computational experience

Preferred Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Matlab environment
• HPC Cluster environment

Additional Information:

Brookhaven Laboratory is committed to providing fair, equitable and competitive compensation. The full salary range for this position is $17.00- $31.75/ hour. You will be placed at the level and salary commensurate with your experience and education. Salary offers will be commensurate with the final candidate's qualification, education and experience and considered with the internal peer group.

Estimated hours for this role will be 25 hours per week, subject to change based on the needs to the research and project.