Research

Spin glasses

My work on spin glasses focuses on the properties of the energy-landscape. In particular, I am looking at disconnectivity graphs and research into the effects that specific features of the energy landscape have on the complexity of these systems. A disconnectivity graph is a two-dimensional representation of a high-dimensional energy landscape depicting the minima of the system and their corresponding barriers. As such it helps to gain an intu- itive insight into highly complex systems and allows for a systematic study of features of the landscape and their effects on the dynamics of processes.

Large-scale optimization

Atoms and molecules can be arranged in various ways to form materials with different properties. The properties are determined by the structure and finding new structures is an open task in computational physics. Here I developed a thermally driven differential mutation algorithm for use in finding structures of amorphous systems corresponding to low lying minima on the energy landscape.

Projection of non-equilibrium processes

Here I am working on problems concerning the mapping of complex multi-dimensional processes onto the symbolic motion in an abstract state space. Many processes in science and engineering are characterized by a large set of independent or coupled state variables. A complete understanding of these processes requires their complete knowledge at any instant of time and/or the knowledge of all external and internal interactions of the system. In many cases, this information is nearly impossible to obtain (experimentally) or just gets too exhaustive and costly in computation and data storage. The focus of my work is addressing, a) which quantities can be inferred from a limited amount of measurements/information of the system and b) how can we map the original dynamics of the system onto the symbolic motion in an abstract state space, so that important properties are conserved in the reduced process.