News
Order in quantum chaos
26 Jan 2026
A new member of the LMU family, quantum physicist Annabelle Bohrdt wants to know what holds materials together in their innermost core.
LMU quantum physicist Annabelle Bohrdt
© LMU
When Annabelle Bohrdt talks about her research, the world of electrons suddenly sounds less like abstract quantum physics than like a social experiment. “We want to know what many quantum particles do when they interact with each other,” she says. This is a simple formulation of a daunting problem, as the space of possible quantum states is so large that no computer in the world can calculate it.
Yet this is precisely what the quantum physicist and her group do: predict how materials behave when you cool them, compress them, irradiate them, or place them in magnetic fields. It is the attempt, with the aid of models, to bring some order to the chaos of interactions between different particles.