Sophie Dinah Beck, Ph.D.

I am a computational materials scientist enthusiastic about electronic structure methods and quantum materials. Currently, I work as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Alessandro Toschi's group at TU Wien. Before this, I was an Associate Research Scientist and Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Quantum Physics. My research focues on ab-initio applications, method and algorithm development, and scientific tool building. I obtained my Ph.D. in Materials Science from ETH Zurich, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Claude Ederer. Beyond research, I am passionate about open-source research software - I contribute to multiple open-source software projects, serve as an editor for the Journal of Open Source Software, and have an interest in data visualization and illustration. Download my CV here or read about my work in this Spotlight article.

Research highlights

Precision many-body methods

While the properties of conventional materials can be described adequately within frameworks like density functional theory, strongly correlated materials often require a more demanding treatment within a many-body framework such as dynamical mean-field theory. Capturing the electronic structure of quantum materials correctly is essential to gain insights into the fascinating physics and potential technological applications of e.g. phase transitions, high-temperature superconductivity, exotic magnetic ordering and Mott physics.

Functional materials

Oxide heterostructures consist of atomic layers of complex transition metal oxides whose properties often differ from those of the corresponding bulk compounds. They therefore offer the opportunity to develop "materials by design", where electronic properties are tailored to specific applications.

Tool building: web app FermiSee

We have recently developed a WebApp for data visualization and phenomenology of correlated electronic structure based on input obtained by Wannier90, and TRIQS. You can test FermiSee in your browser or checkout the git repo for more information and demos.

Spotlight: recent paper

In this recent publication we present an automatic, high-order accurate and adaptive Brillouin zone integration algorithm for the calculation of the optical conductivity using Wannier interpolation. We released an open-source software package AutoBZ.jl available for download implementing the corresponding algorithms in Julia as described in this JOSS paper.

Selected Papers

  1. Marrazzo A., Beck S., Margine E. R., Marzari N., Mostofi A. A., Qiao J., Souza I., Tsirkin S. S., Yates J. R., and Pizzi G., "Wannier-function software ecosystem for materials simulations", Reviews of Modern Physics 96, 045008, (2024) DOI
  2. Blesio G., Beck S., Gingras O., Georges A., and Mravlje J. "Signatures of Hund metal and finite-frequency nesting in Sr2⁢RuO4 revealed by electronic Raman scattering", Physical Review Research 6, 023124 (2024) DOI
  3. Hunter A., Beck S., Cappelli E., Margot F., Straub M., Alexanian Y., Gatti G., Watson M. D., Kim T. K., Cacho C., Plumb N. C., Shi M., Radović M., Sokolov D. A., Mackenzie A. P., Zingl M., Mravlje J., Georges A., Baumberger F., and Tamai A. "Fate of Quasiparticles at High Temperature in the Correlated Metal Sr2RuO4", Physical Review Letters 131, 236502 (2023) DOI
  4. Kaye J., Beck S., Barnett A., Van Muñoz L., and Parcollet O. "Automatic, high-order, and adaptive algorithms for Brillouin zone integration", SciPost Physics 15, 062 (2023) DOI
  5. Beck S., Hampel A., Parcollet O., Ederer C., and Georges A., "Charge self-consistent electronic structure calculations with dynamical mean-field theory using Quantum ESPRESSO, Wannier90 and TRIQS", Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, 34, 345601 (2022) DOI

Software

I contribute to a number of open source software projects.

Name Description
solid_dmft Versatile python wrapper to perform DFT + DMFT calculations utilizing the TRIQS software library
AutoBZ.jl Modular Julia package iplementing efficient algorithms for Brillouin zone integration
FermiSee WebApp for data visualization and phenomenology of correlated electronic structure
TRIQS Toolbox for Research on Interacting Quantum Systems
Quantum ESPRESSO Open-source suite for quantum simulation of materials

Contact

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