“Welcome to the office of a theorist,” announces Assistant Professor of Physics Adrian Feiguin. Intimidating formulas are scrawled on the whiteboards, piles of articles cover the desk, and books on computational and theoretical physics line his bookshelves. Adrian Feiguin is the principal investigator of a theory group in Northeastern’s physics department, and it is far from surprising that he has received two grants to be applied toward two separate and exciting new research projects.
Feiguin was granted funding from both the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The grants mean growth, diversification, and excitement for his group. With this new funding, Feiguin hopes to shed light on long-standing open questions concerning the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism, and to develop new computational methods to tackle these and other problems using ideas from quantum information theory. The algorithms that come out of these endeavors, says Feiguin, will hopefully create a new branch of theory that may be the subject of future research for Feiguin and his team.
Feiguin received his doctorate in physics from Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina. He reflected on his unanticipated career goals, “Imagine coming from a developing country and telling your mom ‘I want to be a physicist.’ She totally panicked.”
After a rewarding four-year fellowship in Argentina, Feiguin’s research took him to multiple universities in the United States. In 2002, at University of California, Irvine, he and his advisor devised a new method of studying systems out of equilibrium, entitled TDMRG (Time-Dependent Density-Matrix Renormalization Group). This development signified a turning point in his career and his research. In 2009, he received his first faculty position at University of Wyoming and was awarded an NSF CAREER grant, further catalyzing his career in research. In 2012, Feiguin joined the Department of Physics at Northeastern University with an already impressive repertoire and enthusiasm to match.
His work in the physics department has much to do with understanding complex physics within things that appear simple. He explained, “A water molecule is much more than just hydrogen and oxygen. It has electrons sitting in multiple energy states that interact with one another.” Currently, Feiguin’s team is exploring alternative materials to silicon to be used in new technologies, such as “spintronics,” which use magnets to process information. “In modern times, technology is based on silicon, but there are many less explored materials that are potentially less limited.” An example of this is “strongly interacting materials,” which are more tunable than semiconductors and exhibit a zoo of “quantum phases” with unusual and exotic properties, such as superconductivity.
As a researcher, Feiguin’s objective is to discover something that will have a positive effect on the modern world. He and his team hope to use the two new grants to achieve this goal. “It’s really beautiful to see when theory and experiments agree,” he said. “We want to use quantum mechanics as Lego bricks in order to build new materials with exciting properties. We are exploring the mysteries of the universe inside matter.”