Welcome to the 22nd edition of the Young Researchers' Meeting (YRM)!

A tradition dating back to 2004, the YRM is an annual meeting organized as part of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF) by and for young researchers. The spirit of the conference is to bring together early-career scientists and provide a space for discussion and networking in an open and friendly environment. 
We invite early-career researchers (Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD students, and early postdocs) interested in the development and application of theory and tools in the fields of condensed matter physics, chemistry, and nanoscience to apply.

[Website coming soon!]

The four-and-a-half-day conference will cover four interdisciplinary topics, selected to both capture the breadth of interests of the ETSF Network and highlight areas where recent breakthroughs have had a major impact:

Day 1-2: Electronic Structure and Optical Properties [1-3]

With the development of methods for ab initio electronic structure calculations in the last decades, the intractable problem of predicting material properties has become computationally more and more feasible. Among these, Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT), has become a reliable technique for the prediction of ground state properties of complex molecules and extended systems alike. Beyond that, wave-function based approaches such as Coupled Cluster, Quantum Monte Carlo or neural-network-based wavefunctions, are very active areas of research.

The description of excited states in response to light - including absorption, reflection, or refraction - poses an even harder problem to solve. Methods from perturbation theory (GW-Approximation, time-dependent-DFT, Bethe-Salpeter equation) have been leveraged to address this, providing increasingly accurate optical spectra, capturing many-body phenomena such as screening and exciton formation.

Method development to realize large-scale calculations also focuses on numerical acceleration and exploring theoretical refinement of approximations.

Day 3: Strong Correlations [4-8]

In strongly correlated materials, the effective strong electron-electron interaction gives rise to interesting - emergent – phenomena, manifesting in often exotic phase diagrams including metal-insulator transitions, superconductivity and heavy fermion behaviour. To capture these phenomena, advanced theoretical frameworks have been developed, ranging from renormalization group techniques to mean-field models like dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) and extensions thereof. 

In parallel, significant efforts are made to treat correlation more adequately within DFT, for instance by the development of hybrid functionals, which carefully combine local and non-local effects to provide a more accurate description of the system.

Day 4: New Phases in Condensed Matter [9-12]

The collective behavior arising from correlations and interactions in many-body systems often give rise to unexpected phenomena. A rich landscape of new phases can emerge from the complex interplay of electronic correlations with non-trivial topology, ranging from Weyl-Kondo semi-metals over topological insulators to altermagnetism. 

While these new phases are becoming increasingly accessible thanks to rapid advances in theoretical frameworks and experimental techniques, it remains challenging to understand how they fit into and emerge from the known physics. At the same time, they offer exciting possibilities for novel technological applications, such as harnessing the giant magnetoresistance effects in spintronic devices.

Day 5: Transport and Vibrational Properties [13-15]

Vibrational properties of solids and molecules are crucial in electronic transport phenomena, underpin superconductivity and determine the temperature dependence of optical properties through electron-phonon and exciton-phonon coupling mechanisms. The interplay between lattice dynamics and electronic structure is essential for enhancing the predictive power of ab initio methods in comparison with experiments. State-of-the-art computational approaches include Density Functional Perturbation Theory (DFPT) for phonon calculations in solids, the Boltzmann Transport Equation for simulating thermal properties such as the thermal conductivity and First Principles Molecular Dynamics simulations. These techniques are widely implemented in ab initio codes like Quantum Espresso and can be integrated with more advanced frameworks based on the Green's function formalism or with machine learning interatomic potentials allowing for increasingly accurate and comprehensive descriptions of materials’ behavior.