Thomas Barthel

A native of Leipzig, Germany, Thomas Barthel studied in Heidelberg and Aachen, and received his doctoral degree from RWTH Aachen in 2009 with work on the scaling of entanglement and new tensor network state techniques for the simulation of strongly-correlated condensed matter systems with applications on quantum magnets and ultracold atom systems. After postdoctoral work at University of Potsdam, FU Berlin, and LMU Munich, he became a CNRS research associate at Université Paris-Saclay. In 2015, he became faculty member at the Duke Department of Physics, leading a reasearch group on quantum many-body theory and numerics before joining QLab and UMD Physics in 2025.

Research Interests:

• Quantum computation and simulation
  • Methods for the investigation of quantum matter
  • Variational quantum algorithms and barren plateaus
  • Ultracold atoms in optical lattices, ion-trap quantum computers, Rydberg atoms in optical tweezers
• Quantum condensed matter physics and numerics
  • Strongly correlated systems
  • Phase transitions, dynamic response, criticality, and universality
  • Nonequilibrium phenomena, open driven-dissipative quantum systems, and transport
  • Scaling and evolution of entanglement
  • Semidefinite relaxations of the groundstate problem
• Stochastic dynamics in networks, rare events, and epidemic outbreaks
• Tensor network state methods (MPS, TTN, MERA, PEPS)
• Fundamental properties and information-theoretic aspects of many-particle systems
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence