On Wednesday 10th August our colleague and dear friend Sandro Sorella tragically passed away. The TREX consortium sends its heartfelt condolences to Sandro’s wife Luisa, their children Massimo and Sara, and to all those students and colleagues who had the pleasure and honour to work with him. Sandro was not only an amazing scientist but a true gentleman and friend to us all.
Professor of the Condensed Matter Theory Sector at SISSA, Sandro was the world master in the science and art of Quantum Monte Carlo computer simulation of interacting fermion systems. He made many groundbreaking contributions to many-body physics in several fields, both for the development of numerical methods for quantum systems and in using them to understand many-body physics. His simulations have led to important understanding of lattice models describing strongly correlated systems such as Mott insulators, including prophetic work on their topological description, high temperature superconductors and also realistic models of condensed matter systems such as hydrogen at high pressures and electronic correlation in molecules.
Sandro was the founder and the main developer of the TurboRVB code, one of the flagship codes of TREX. His focus was on the study of strongly-correlated electron systems by advanced numerical simulation techniques based on quantum Monte Carlo. He developed novel Monte Carlo algorithms that are now widely used and considered state-of-the-art in the field.
You will be missed, Sandro.
Rest in peace
Your TREX colleagues and friends
Interview with Sandro Sorella, recorded in Versailles in March 2022 during the TREX All-hands meeting
Download the presentations given at the Psi-k 2022 conference during the Memorial session dedicated to Sandro:
- Sandro’s legacy: 3 generations of scientists (Download) - Matteo Calandra, Department of Physics, University of Trento, Italy
- Sandro's contribution to ab initio calculations (Download) - Michele Casula, CNRS and Sorbonne University, Paris, France
- Memory of our daily research and the TurboRVB family of codes (Download) - Kosuke Nakano, SISSA, Condensed matter theory group, JSPS oversea fellow JAIST, School of Information Science, Assistant Professor
- Sandro Sorella: Two of his Gems (Download) - Giuseppe Carleo, Computational Quantum Science Lab Institute of Physics, EPFL - Lausanne - Switzerland