Sung G. Chung

Dr. Sung C. Chung is a professor of condensed matter physics  in the Department of Physics at Western Michigan University. He has been developing a novel many-body method, entanglement perturbation theory (EPT). The idea of EPT is divide and conquer. It represents states and operators in tensor products and reduces the calculation of the quantum ground state and the partition function to a generalized eigenvalue problem.

Chung has calculated the quantum ground states in 1 and 2 dimensions, the elementary excitation in 1D systems, the long-range spin correlation confirming the conformal-field-theory prediction for the first time, and the quasi-1D quantum ground state, thereby reproducing various exact analytic solutions, the Onsager solution of the 2D Ising model, the 1D Bethe Ansatz solution, as well as the 1D bosonization result. The models he has studied include the Ising model, the Hubbard model and the Heisenberg model in statistical mechanics and strong correlation phenomena in condensed matter.

Some preliminary results in Chung's ongoing works on quantum thermodynamics in 1D and simple molecules CH₄ and H₂O indicate that EPT is as good as DMRG there, too. He is interested in seeing how far EPT can evolve beyond relatively simple models, toward real materials particularly strongly correlated quantum systems in 1D, 2D such as carbon-nanotubes, grapheme, and a variety of high-temperature superconductors.