Agenda

Résumé : Materials in which electrons `work as a team’ in a strongly correlated manner display emergent collective behavior at the macroscopic scale, such as superconductivity, magnetism, or metal-insulator transitions. Materials synthesis is constantly surprising us with new families of such materials. The `standard model’ of solid-state physics, based on electrons occupying bands of individual energy levels, must be seriously revised for strongly correlated materials. Instead, a description accounting for both localized atomic excitations and delocalized wave-like quasiparticles is required. I will review how Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) – and more broadly `Quantum Embedding’ methods – fulfills this goal and provides an original physical perspective on strongly correlated electron materials. Thanks to the contributions of a large community over almost three decades, the theory now provides a practical framework to understand and predict the properties of quantum materials starting from their structure and chemical composition. I will discuss in particular how DMFT allowed to identify `Hund metals’ as a large family of materials in which strong correlations emerge for different reasons than in the classic Mott and heavy fermion compounds