Group Leader, Biophysical and Biomedical Measurement

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Bio: Michael Zwolak is the Group Leader of Biophysical and Biomedical Measurement at NIST. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech on the use of tensor networks to simulate many-body quantum systems, as well as B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Philosophy from Virginia Tech. After stints as a Feynman Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a faculty member of the Department of Physics at Oregon State University, he joined the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Now within the Biophysical and Biomedical Measurement Group, he leads efforts in precision measurement and simulation across multiple time- and length- scales of the biological hierarchy to discover fundamental principles of molecular physiology.

Michael has made seminal contributions to the theory of molecular and nanofluidic devices, self-assembly, and biomolecular metrology, including setting the theoretical foundations for rapid DNA sequencing with electronic sensors embedded in fluidic devices and discovering a scaling theory to capture quantitative behavior of ionic transport within all-atom molecular dynamics. His current focus is on developing scalable, manufacturable sensors for biomolecular diagnostics and illuminating molecular physiology, as well as advancing the state of the art in biomolecular simulation and machine learning.

Topic: "Emergent structure, tensor networks, and the simulation of many-body transport"

Abstract: Quantum transport—the coherent flow of particles through a many-body system—is the foundation to multiple technologies and is central to our understanding of non-equilibrium phenomena. Transport provides a way to shuffle around entangled degrees of freedom in platforms for quantum computing. It also probes a material, junction, or interface as those are transversed by particles, yielding valuable information in nanoscale electronic sensors and metrologies, such as inelastic tunneling and noise spectroscopy. Transport remains, though, one of the most challenging processes to model and simulate, even for the simplest of systems, such as few level impurities. The presence of electron or particle reservoirs generates a continuous stream of events, such as electron-electron or electron-phonon scattering, that pushes the state well beyond equilibrium. In such states, correlations and entanglement proliferate, and a new underlying structure emerges. I will discuss how to leverage physical and emergent structure to create efficient, modular simulations that help define the limits of classical simulations, as well as shed light on non-equilibrium phenomena in the natural world.

Thursday, November 21, 2024

11:00am

102 BEH

Host: Juan Jose Mendoza Arenas