Turan Birol

I am a first principles theorist, who use state of the art first principles methods to work on solid state physics problems, and perform materials by design: not to only explain, but also to predict the properties of crystalline matter, and come up with new compounds with superior properties. My research interests lie on the intersection of solid state physics, structural chemistry, and materials science, and my long term research goal is to identify materials realizations of the exotic phases in condensed matter.

My group works on a wide range of materials that host interesting phenomena, including ferroelectrics, multiferroics, spin-orbit coupled Mott insulators, and high temperature superconductors. Our ab initio tool box includes not only the standard Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory (DFT), but also more advanced methods that build upon DFT, such as the Embedded Dynamical Mean Field Theory, and evolutionary structure prediction algorithms. The most important analytical tools we employ are Group and Representation Theories, which we extensively apply on solid state materials.