Despite the incredible power of the world‘s contemporary supercomputers, there are problems which cannot be addressed by using conventional techniques. The main limitation is in the eventual end of Moore‘s law due to quantum interference. The idea of a quantum computer is to use quantum mechanics to our advantage. At our department we perform quantum computations on a next generation D-Wave 2000Q™ quantum computer. Remote cloud access along with an easy to use API enables a straightforward implementation of all problems which can be encoded by the following Hamiltonian.
The theoretical group at the department is interested in theoretical investigations and Monte Carlo simulations of polarons on a crystal lattice.
The frustration induced by the mismatch between the polaron lattice and the atomic lattice causes the emergence of amorphous configurations, crystals, domain walls and a correlated liquid. Due to the large near degeneracy of the amorphous as well as domain wall configurations, a new state of matter might appear in such a system. A quantum charge liquid.
Programming on a computer cluster with more than 6000 available cores using parallelization. Code which efficiently employs all the available resources is key in providing extensive physical insight into the behavior of a model system as well as using state of the art Monte Carlo techniques.

Left: A commensurate charge density wave, which we model as a charged lattice gas of polarons. Right: A simulated amorphous polaronic pattern.

References: ArXiv preprint arXiv:1803.00255 (2018)