September 8-10, 2026 • Rockville, MD
TN-QuMat shared its research and training program with the national theoretical condensed matter physics community at the 2026 Principal Investigators' Meeting of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences, held September 8–10 in Rockville, Maryland.
Lead PI Hanna Terletska of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) was invited to present a poster on TN-QuMat as a DOE RENEW project. The poster, “TN-QuMat: Tennessee Quantum Materials Research and Training Program,” appeared in the session on superconducting and quantum materials on September 9.
Thomas Maier of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), TN-QuMat’s ORNL lead PI and a co-author of the poster, also attended the meeting.
Research Across Three Thrusts
The poster showed how TN-QuMat connects theory, computation, and experiment to understand how disorder, strong correlations, topology, and dimensionality govern the properties of quantum materials. Trainees contribute directly to each thrust.
- Thrust 1: Many-body theory and simulation. Terletska, Maier, and Emanuel Gull (University of Michigan) study how interactions and disorder localize electrons, and the team has implemented disorder in the ORNL DCA++ framework to treat interactions, disorder, and nonlocal correlations together. Trainees: Patrick Wong and Anirudha Mirmira.
- Thrust 2: Ab initio study of superconductivity. John Villanova (MTSU), Tom Berlijn (ORNL), and Maier use first-principles calculations to investigate unconventional superconductivity in iron-based materials such as YFe₂Ge₂. Trainees: Ivy Morelli and Michael Marking.
- Thrust 3: Synthesis and characterization. Richard Mu (TSU) and Akira Ueda (Fisk University) combine modeling of near-field heat transfer in SiC nanowires with the synthesis and characterization of ZnO nanowires. Trainees: Tyler Sax and Nalina Karkee.
Research as the Training Platform
DOE RENEW supports research that also builds the workforce, and the poster highlighted TN-QuMat’s training pathways: an annual meeting and hands-on workshop, a 10-week summer internship at ORNL, which placed five interns in 2026, and the AMPLIFY Scholars Program for undergraduates, which selected 12 scholars from about 70 applicants in 2026.
The meeting gave TN-QuMat a chance to share its results with leading researchers in the field and with the DOE program managers who oversee this research.
Acknowledgment
TN-QuMat is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy RENEW program under award DE-SC0025748. For more about TN-QuMat, visit https://tn-qumat.org.