Prize Recipient

Simon Groth
Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel

"For developing Monte Carlo methods that overcome the fermion sign problem, leading to the first ab initio data for an electron gas under warm dense matter conditions."

Simon Groth received his MS (2014) and PhD (2018) in physics from the Christian-Albrechts university in Kiel, Germany. He stayed as postdoc researcher at University in Kiel until 2019 before switching career to business consultancy with McKinsey & Company. Simon’s research career has been devoted to the development of new quantum Monte Carlo techniques in order to enable a better understanding of warm dense matter systems. In particular, Simon developed and improved the configuration path integral Monte-Carlo approach and thereby accomplished an ab-initio simulation of the highly degenerate warm dense electron gas – a system that is of fundamental importance for correlation functionals utilized in manyfold density functional theory simulations. Simon has been awarded the Laster and Particle Beams Prize in 2017.

William Farmer (Chair), Howard Milchberg (Vice Chair), Will Fox ('20 recipient), Radha Bahukutumbi, Matt Landreman