Daniel Agterberg is a Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He received his PhD in 1996 at the University of Toronto and held postdoctoral positions at ETH-Zurich (1996-1998) and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee Florida (1998-2000). His research is on correlated quantum materials with an emphasis on superconductivity and   magnetism. Specifically, he combines symmetry, topology, and electronic interactions to address the most exciting quantum materials. This has led to the discovery of Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces in superconductors, to the development of the theory of pair density wave superconductivity, and to the explanation of spin-triplet superconductivity from spin-singlet superconducting interactions (as observed in CeRh2As2).  In this Simons Collaboration, he will apply this approach to discover new insights into superconductivity driven by the non-trivial interplay of electronic valley, orbital, and spin degrees of freedom. 

Erez Berg (Born in 1977 in Haifa, Israel) is a Professor at Department of Condensed Matter Physics in the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He studies the physics that emerges from the interaction between many quantum particles. A better understanding of such systems is vital for eventually creating practical quantum devices based on high-temperature superconductors-materials that conduct electricity with virtually no dissipation but do so well above the near-absolute-zero temperatures required for the emergence of this phenomenon in conventional superconducting materials.

Prof. Berg adds to the collaboration his expertise in unconventional superconductivity, two-dimensional electronic systems, and numerical techniques, such as quantum Monte Carlo. In addition, he has worked extensively on non-Fermi liquid and superconductivity in flat bands, two recurring themes in the field of superconductivity beyond BCS theory.

Prof. Berg received the 2024 André Deloro Prize for Scientific Research, the Blavatnik Award for Young scientists in Israel from the Blavatnik Family Foundation (2019), a consolidator ERC grant (2019), the Morris Levinson Prize in Physics (2015), a Minerva ARCHES prize (2013), and an Alon fellowship (2012).

Nick Bultinck is an associate professor of physics at Ghent University (Belgium), where he also obtained his MSc (2013) and PhD (2017) degrees. After his PhD, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University. In 2022 he received a University Research Fellowship of the Royal Society, and since 2023 he leads the ERC Starting Grant project SIESS. Nick’s research interests include strongly correlated electron systems exhibiting magnetism, superconductivity and/or other forms of symmetry breaking. He is particularly interested in understanding the interplay between these different symmetry breaking patterns, especially when they occur in the presence of strong quantum fluctuations. In the last years his research has focussed predominantly on two-dimensional Van der Waals materials, such as for example magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene and other moiré materials. He also works on developing and applying tensor network algorithms to strongly correlated quantum many-body systems.

Laura Classen is an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Solid StateResearch and Assistant professor at Technical University of Munich. She obtained a M.Sc. from RWTH Aachen university (2013) and a PhD from University of Heidelberg (2016). Before her current positions, she worked as a postdoc and Feodor-Lynen Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory and University of Minnesota (2017–2020), and as an Assistant Scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory (2020-2021).

In her research she investigates correlated quantum materials with methods of quantum field theory. In these materials the collective behaviour of interacting electrons leads to fascinating states of matter such as superconductivity and quantum magnetism. The goal her research is to understand the mechanisms behind the formation of the different states, and predict the resulting properties. In 2023, she received an ERC starting grant to study emergent phases including superconductivity near quantum critical points.

Ion Errea (Donostia/San Sebastián, 1984) holds a degree (2007) and PhD (2011) in Physics from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris and the Donostia International Physics Centre (DIPC). He was shortlisted for the 2015 Volker Heine Young Investigator Award and was selected Emerging Leader by the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. 

Since 2018, he leads the research group on Quantum Theory of Materials at the Centre for Material Physics (CSIC-UPV/EHU) and is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Physics at the University of the Basque Country. His research focusses on the development of theoretical methods for calculating complex properties of solids: quantum and anharmonic effects in atomic vibrations, electron-phonon interaction, and the application of these methods in hydrogen-based superconductors, themoelectric materials, phase transitions in solids and nanostructures, etc. 

Ion Errea leads the ERC-funded Starting Grant project titled Discovery and Characterization of Hydrogen-Based High-Temperature Superconductors. His research has been published in prestigious scientific journals including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Nano Letters and Physical Review Letters. He has also been a guest speaker at dozens of international conferences.

Kristjan Haule is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was born in Slovenia and obtained his B.A. in Physics in 1997 and his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He conducted his Ph.D. research at Karlsruhe University in Germany and at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia. Haule was a postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers (2002-2003) and held a research position at the Jožef Stefan Institute (2003-2005). He became an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University in 2005, an Associate Professor in 2009, a Professor in 2012, and a Distinguished Professor in 2019. He received the NSF Career Award in 2008, the Rutgers Board of Trustees Award for Scholarly Excellence in 2009, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 2008 to 2010. He was also awarded the Blavatnik Award in 2013 and the Simons Fellowship in 2020. In 2019, he was named an APS Fellow in the Division of Materials Science. 

Haule’s research specialties lie in condensed matter theory, with a focus on electronic structure theory for correlated electron solids and algorithm development. He is particularly known for developing predictive theories for correlated electron solids, including the implementation of a method that embeds dynamical mean-field theory with density functional theory, as well as the variational diagrammatic Monte Carlo method, which provides exact predictions for the uniform electron gas problem. Haule has published over 170 scientific papers, obtained over 20,000 citations, and has the h-index of 70. 

Miguel Marques received his PhD degree in Physics from the University of Wuerzburg in 2000, working under the supervision of E.K.U. Gross in the field of density functional theory for superconductors. He then held several post-doctoral positions in Spain, Germany, and in France. From 2005 to 2007 he was assistant professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. From 2007 to 2014 he was CNRS researcher at the University of Lyon 1, and from 2014 to 2023 professor at the Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. He is now professor at the Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the Ruhr University Bochum. His current research interests include density functional theory, superconductivity, application of machine learning to materials science, etc. He authored more than 200 articles, and has edited three books published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Physics series. He also organized several summer schools and international workshops, such as the Benasque School and International Workshop in TDDFT, that takes place in Benasque, Spain every second year.

Nikolay Prokofiev is a physics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He graduated from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MSc 1982) with PhD form Kurchatov Institute, Moscow (1987).   His research interests include numerical algorithms for solving strongly correlated quantum and classical systems consisting of bosons, fermions, and spins, new phases of matter, critical phenomena, quantum decoherence, and all aspects of superfluidity and superconductivity. He is one of co-inventors of the worm algorithm and diagrammatic Monte Carlo methods, which radically changed our ability to simulate properties of large systems. In this Collaboration, Nikolay will (i) investigate the role of Coulomb repulsion on superconductivity with the goal of achieving precise parameter-free treatment of its effects in materials, (ii) establish criteria for breakdown of the Migdal-Eliashberg theory at strong electron-phonon coupling and properties of the emerging polaron/bipolaron liquid, (iii) develop high-order diagrammatic approach to superconductivity in flat-band systems.

Jonathan Ruhman is an associate professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He graduated from the Weizmann Institute of Science in September 2015, after which he accepted the Gordon and Betty Moore Fellowship for postdoctoral studies at MIT (2015-2018). Ruhman's research focuses on strongly correlated physics in electronic systems, with an emphasis on unconventional superconductivity. He has made notable contributions to the study of superconductivity in low-density systems, such as SrTiO3 and YPtBi, including constraining plasmon superconductivity and developing the theory of ferroelectric quantum criticality in dilute metals. Additionally, Ruhman is one of the pioneers in tackling the problem of the "measurement-induced phase transition" observed in monitored random unitary circuits. His contributions have been recognized by several prizes and fellowships, including the Krill Prize for promising young investigators, awarded by the Wolf Foundation, and the "Frontiers in Science Award" from the Beijing Institute of Basic Sciences and Applications.

Oskar Vafek is a Professor of Physics at Florida State University and the Director of the condensed matter theory group at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. He was born in Slovakia and obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of late Zlatko Tesanovic. Vafek was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford (2003-2006) and became an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in 2006. He received the NSF Career Award in 2010. In 2022, he was named an APS Fellow in the Division of Condensed Matter Physics.

His research involves a broad range of topics in the theory of quantum condensed matter, from superconductivity in correlated electron systems to Chern insulators in flat bands. In this collaboration Vafek plans to contribute to predictive description of the mechanism and nature of superconductivity in novel material platforms, particularly flat bands.