This school is the second of a series of events devoted to Computational physics and  hosted by the prestigious Ecole de Physique des Houches (Rhône-Alpes, France) located 1h30/2h00/2h30 mns away from Lausanne/Grenoble/Lyon.  The first school was organized in June/July 2011 with focus on Soft Matter. The present one will be devoted to Ab initio quantum simulations in condensed matter physics. From basic theories to tutorials on well-distributed computational packages, the aim is to take advantage of the 10 days reserved at Les Houches to offer a large panorama of the techniques and codes used in our community, beyond the standard few days workshops devoted to specific techniques or codes. From PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, to permanent researchers aiming at understanding and using ab initio quantum simulation tools, the public is expected to be rather large and diversified.
The school will be composed of lectures and tutorials.  The basic theories related to Density Functional Theory (DFT) and its perturbative (dielectric properties, phonons, etc.) or time-dependent (TD-DFT) extensions, the many-body-perturbation theories for the quasiparticle (GW) and optical (BSE) properties, together with the various strategies adopted for their implementations (pseudopotentials, basis, algorithms, etc.) will serve as the introductory background. A second family of lectures will focus on Applications exploiting the information that can be obtained e.g. from DFT calculations: molecular dynamics (BO, Car-Parrinello), the search for saddle points (NEB, ART, etc.), electronic transport within DFT (including out-of-equilibrium implementations), or the calculation of electron-phonon matrix elements and their use. These formal presentations will be complemented by introductory lectures  to more advanced many-body techniques such as quantum Monte Carlo,  DMFT, or wavefunction based coupled-cluster approaches. Finally, tutorials on well-distributed packages (AbInit, QuantumEspresso, Siesta, BigDFT, Yambo, etc.) will be organized with the participation of some of the developers of these codes.

SLIDES will be posted on the Centre Blaise Pascal web site for this event. Please visit:  http://www.cbp.ens-lyon.fr/tiki-index.php?page=Houches2012