About

My full name is Alexandre Miguel de Araújo Lopes and I am a 27 years old PhD student. Here’s a very succinct description of me:

I am, and have always been, a curious person. I have always strived to understand the World, and my interests range from Physics to Mathematics to Biology to Chemistry and Computer Science. From all the things I could have studied I choose Physics. Why did I decide to study Physics and not one of the other sciences I also like? Well, I would say that Physics is probably the broadest science. Physics tries to explain Nature using in rigorous way, using Mathematics. Physics is really challenging and completely breaks common sense in a lot of occasions. Physics… well, Physics is just awesome!

For all the reasons above, I decided to formally study Physics, while being an autodidact in different areas like Biology, Computer Science and even in Physics (because college education alone is not enough…). I hold a BSc and a MSc from University of Aveiro, Portugal, in (Theoretical) Physics. My Bachelor thesis was in condensed matter physics and was entitled The Aharonov-Bohm effect and persistent currents in quantum rings . It studied, theoretically, some properties of quantum rings enclosing an external magnetic flux, namely persistent currents, using different models such as the electron gas model, the tight binding model and interacting spinless fermions (tV model). My Master’s thesis, also in the area of condensed matter physics, and building on my Bachelor’s thesis was entitled Electronic, thermodynamic and transport properties of the diamond chain. This thesis consisted in the study of the electronic and transport properties of the diamond chain (which is actually a fancy name for a system like this) when it is threaded by a magnetic field. I studied not only a perfect chain but also study the effect of next nearest neighbors coupling, of introducing impurities in the system and of interactions. This is actually a very interesting system. You can check it here.

During my research I used techniques from many body physics such as mean field theory, Green’s functions and Luttinger liquid theory (using the formalism of second quantization).

On 2011 I have worked at Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, under the supervision of Mikahil Katsnelson in the theory of the membrane behavior of a recently isolated material: graphene.

Right now I am doing a PhD at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in the group Quantum Correlations in Physics, Math, and Computer Science under the supervision of David Gross. I still continue to work on Condensed Matter Physics but I am now also working on Quantum Chemistry and in the Quantum Marginal problem and slowly shifting to more mathematical minded approaches/methods.

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