Peter Scherpelz, PhD

Peter Scherpelz is a Computational Physicist at Modern Hydrogen.

Peter was previously a postdoctoral researcher in computational condensed matter physics at the University of Chicago. He works with Professor Giulia Galli in the new Institute for Molecular Engineering at the university. His primary project focused on the use of doped silicon systems for quantum information. Peter’s work explored the detailed electronic properties of both the lithography method and the resulting device configurations.

Peter also did his graduate work at the University of Chicago, in the Department of Physics with Professor Kathy Levin. Peter’s work focused on two related systems: high-temperature superconductors, and trapped, ultracold atomic gases. His thesis work, which he finished in the winter of 2014, focused on the pseudogap state of these systems, in which particles seem to form pairs at anomalously high temperatures. Peter also studied trapped atomic gases through simulations. Current experiments allow for many approaches to creating and probing non-equilibrium dynamics of these fluids, including observing the behavior of vortices and solitons. He was able to use simulations to correctly identify a puzzling object seen in experiments on clouds of ultracold fermionic atoms in 2013. This identification as a single vortex line, which depended on properly capturing symmetry-breaking disorder that is unavoidable experimentally, was independently verified by concurrent experiments.