UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Thesis Proposal Presentation

Kaitlyn Morrell

“Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo Approaches to Finite-Temperature Quantum Matter”

Accurate thermodynamic predictions for nuclear matter, which in some regimes is well modeled by the unitary Fermi gas, are in high demand. Here, we propose a way to tackle those calculations non-perturbatively for the case of dilute neutron matter at finite temperature. Two projects to address the computational cost of quantum Monte Carlo techniques are proposed to enable the generation of numerous samples needed to calculate thermodynamic observables. The ultimate goal is to use these samples to produce a library of thermodynamic observables ranging from benchmark calculations of idealized systems to more realistic models of nuclear matter at finite temperature.