’Unsolvable’ is no excuse

Tobias Schäfer With an ESPRIT grant from the Austrian Science Fund FWF, Tobias Schäfer is developing new computational methods to solve previously unsolvable quantum physics problems in computational materials physics. The Schrödinger equation, the famous basic equation of quantum theory, which Erwin Schrödinger first published in 1926, is almost a hundred years old. With this equation, it was possible for the first time to explain the properties of a hydrogen atom exactly, and since then it has proven itself brilliantly in countless applications. But the Schrödinger equation has a big problem: when many particles are involved at the same time, it becomes extremely complicated and cannot be solved exactly even with the best supercomputers in the world. And that's a pity - because it's precisely such many-particle phenomena that we often have to deal with in materials physics: How precisely can material properties be calculated? What happens on the surface of a catalyst at the atomic level? How much do certain material surfaces reduce the energy barriers for the production of solar fuels? Highly endowed grant for Tobias Schäfer. Tobias Schäfer works as a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at TU Wien. He is working on novel computational methods that can be used to answer quantum physics questions that would be completely unsolvable if the Schrödinger equation were simply applied naively.