Søren Fournais, professor

Søren received his PhD from Aarhus University in 1999. After positions at the Erwin Schrödinger Institute in Vienna and Université de Paris-Sud, he came back to Aarhus in 2006 first as Associated Professor and later Professor.

Søren held a Starting Independent Researcher Grant from The European Research Council (2009-2014) on Mathematical Problems in Superconductivity and Bose-Einstein Condensation and a Sapere Aude DFF-Advanced grant (2015-2020). He became a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2014 and the Ministry of Science and Education awarded him an EliteForsk-prize in 2018.

Equations of quantum mechanics

The research of Søren Fournais is concerned with a mathematical understanding of the equations of quantum mechanics. A particular focus has been quantum mechanical systems where magnetic fields play a strong role such as the effective equations of superconductivity: the Ginzburg-Landau equations. Another theme has been the semiclassical limit where quantum mechanics becomes comparable to classical mechanics and where there is a strong link mathematically to microlocal analysis.

The focus of Søren’s research in recent years has been the mathematical understanding of Bose-Einstein Condensation. The physical systems under consideration here consist of a dilute gas of bosonic atoms all interacting with each other. This is a highly correlated system of a very large number of particles and we lack good mathematical tools to analyse and describe these systems to the desired precision.

A recent breakthrough - together with Jan Philip Solovej - was the calculation of the ground state energy of such a system up to second-order corrections in the diluteness parameter - the so-called Lee-Huang-Yang formula for the energy. Søren will build on this new understanding to collaborate with members of the QMATH and QUANTUM FOR LIFE centres.

You can meet Søren at Vibenshuset, Lyngbyvej 2.