College of Science & Engineering
Twin Cities
These researchers continue to work as part of an interdisciplinary group of mathematicians and physicists on understanding Anderson localization, or, more generally, the localization of eigenfunctions of elliptic operators by disorder. This phenomenon, which is of great significance in many applications (such as quantum mechanics where it gives rise to a metal/insulator transition in disordered alloys), is famously difficult to explain, predict, and control. In the collaboration, this group handles all the computation, which is driving the collaboration. They have developed algorithms to predict both the localization regions of eigenfunctions and the values of ground states without the need to solve any eigenvalue problems! Some of this work has been submitted and other studies and publications are underway. Certain aspects of this research require looking at very fine scale disorder in 2D and 3D, which requires considerable parallelism.