Exploring, understanding, and describing materials with strong electronic Coulomb correlations remain among the big challenges of modern condensed matter physics. Correlated materials are characterized by an extreme sensitivity to external probes such as pressure or temperature, and slight changes in composition, constraints during the growth process (e.g. by heterostructuring) or off-stoechiometries can significantly alter their properties. As a result, even a qualitatively reliable theoretical description may depend on quantitative details of the electronic structure, stressing the need for both, an accurate treatment of many-body effects and first principles techniques with predictive capabilities. The task is even harder as, in general, the properties of correlated materials display intrinsic non-trivial temperature dependences (in particular beyond simple Fermi factors) and many of the most intriguing phenomena involve excited states.
Despite of these challenges, the field is rapidly evolving, and progress at the many-body theory and first principles frontiers, as well as at their intersection, is substantial. Moreover, recent developments in machine learning and data science promise to greatly extend the scope of many-body methods and improve our ability to discover new correlated electron physics.

The goal of our symposium is to give an overview of recent developments in the field of correlated electron materials. Various strategies of approaching the problem from a combined first principles many-body perspective shall be presented, along with applications to recent materials questions.

The symposium will address recent advances in
1) numerical many-body techniques,
2) interfacing many-body techniques with electronic structure theory,
3) improved electronic structure schemes for both, ground and excited states,
4) the description of particularly challenging materials classes, and
5) algorithmic/machine learning aspects.

In 2018, the Spring Meeting of the Condensed Matter Section of the German Physical Society (DPG) will be held together with the European Physical Society (EPS) in Berlin. With more than 5,000 expected participants the yearly DPG spring meeting is the largest European physics conference (the second largest physics conference worldwide) covering all aspects of condensed matter and chemical physics, materials science, surface science, as well as polymer and biophysics, and more. The conference language is English.

This will be an official symposium at the DPG/EPS Spring Meeting, hosted by the Surface Science Division of the DPG, but topics are not restricted to surface science. Everybody in the wider field of computational materials and electronic structure theory will be invited to attend and to submit an abstract.

 More information can be found here: https://th.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/meetings/DPGSym2018/