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Professor Adam Rycerz — Department of Condensed Matter Theory and Nanophysics (head). Institute of Theoretical Physics [Till 2019: Marian Smoluchowski Institute of Physics], Jagiellonian University.
Address:	Łojasiewicza 11, PL-30348 Kraków, Poland
Phone:	+48 12 664 4568 (campus)
Office:	D-2-63 (see in google maps)
E-mail:	rycerz@th.if.uj.edu.pl
WWW:	https://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~adamr/
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Research

Contemporary condensed matter physics focuses on various unusual states of matter appearing due to peculiar features of quantum mechanics. The concept of emergence, occuring when a complex system shows qualitatively different properties then its building blocks, seems to reappear - in some form - in every new subfield of condensed matter physics. The particular research areas I have been working in so far include:

Emergent Dirac fermions in graphene. A beautiful example of the emergent system that hosts ultrarelativistic quasiparticles (massless Dirac fermions), albeit being build of essentially nonrelativistic elements (carbon nuclei and electrons), is known since 2005 due to seminal work by Novoselov, Geim, and others. Several other Dirac condensed-matter systems have been described thereupon. Unusual properties of graphene, directly following from the nature of effective quasiparticles, include the universal value of dc conductivity, the universal value of visible light absorption (both given by the fundamental constants of nature), and nonstandard (half-odd integer) Landau level sequence in quantum Hall effect. For some introduction, and my personal view on the topic, you may check out a short article in Atomium Culture (or download this PDF file). This research area is currently being explored in the ongoing Project SONATA BIS.

Electron correlations at nanoscale. Even basic material characteristics need to be carefully redefined when talking about the systems consists of just a few atoms. In particular, such systems always show a nonzero energy gap (a standard signature of an insulating state) accompanied by a nonzero dc conductance (a signature of a metallic state), making it quite difficult to classify them as metals or insulators. Such an issue was a central one considered in my PhD Thesis: Physical properties and quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated electron systems from a combined exact diagonalization - ab initio approach (Jagiellonian University, 2003) [see handle], supervised by Prof. Józef Spałek. Main results, together with related ones obtained by my colleagues in early 2000s, were summarized in this review article. For more recent outcomes from the so-called EDABI method, you may check out this open-access article by Kądzielawa et al.

Entangled states of matter and superconductivity. The notion of quantum entanglement, and its qualitative measures, are usually associated with topics of quantum communication and quantum information processing. However, the question whether (or not) the wavefunction of a complex system can be represented as a product of wavefunctions describing its building blocks, is of a fundamental nature and can be addressed to any quantum-mechanical system. Probably, the relation between entanglement and quantum phase transitions was first pointed out by Osterloh, Amico, and others. It seems that the concept of long-range entanglement may help to unveil the common nature of high-temperature superconductors and other topologically-ordered systems. Besides, basic entanglement measures can also be used to distinguish between different transport regimes of nanosystems (which, strictly speaking, do not show phase transitions), such as a quantum dot in the Kondo limit. Recently, we have proposed the entanglement-based criterion for the Mott transition in correlated nanosystems.

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