A new numerical approach to strongly correlated quantum physics in 2D.

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Quantum physics in two dimensions is technologically relevant and fundamentally interesting; it is also difficult - available methods are generally limited to small system sizes or unrealistic approximations. The main problem is the number of degrees of freedom one must consider, which grows exponentially with system size. Methods for solving anything but the most trivial problems must select which of these degrees of freedom really matter and discard the rest. The technique known as the 'density matrix renormalisation group' (DMRG) has revolutionised numerical studies of quantum systems by selecting the essential degrees of freedom in a remarkably efficient manner. DMRG has proven to be a highly accurate and robust tool for calculating properties of materials that are quasi-1D: systems that can be described as a one dimensional lattice or 'chain' of sites. Unfortunately this method stumbles in two spatial dimensions and above - it quickly becomes inefficient as system size grows.A result from quantum information theory, known as the 'area law' shows the failure of conventional 2D DMRG is linked to the enhanced growth of quantum entanglement above 1D. Too much entanglement between different subregions of the system causes DMRG to grind to a halt. The area law states that entanglement scales with the boundary or 'area' between two subregions. In 1D the boundary can only be one or two points, independent of the total system size. In 2D the area will in fact scale like the perimeter of a subregion. In other words, it will increase linearly as the system gets bigger, until the DMRG approach is too inefficient to be useful.Effective numerical techniques are vital because analytic methods based on simple approximations fail for the most interesting problems, where quantum fluctuations are dominant, while more sophisticated exact approaches available in 1D do not have analogues in higher dimensions.By considering the anisotropic 2D case of a coupled array of exactly solvable chains we can minimise the relevant boundary area, thus minimising the entanglement problem. Combining the properties of the exactly solvable subunits with the power of DMRG, leads to an algorithm that can efficiently perform larger scale simulations than competing techniques.Using an anisotropic representation does not prohibit us from the applying the results to isotropic systems as we are generally interested in 'universal' quantities that are independent of such microscopic details.I intend to develop this algorithm beyond its proof-of-concept implementation into a general tool for studying the properties of two dimensional quantum systems, including their quantum information content.In so doing, I will apply it to an important benchmark problem, relevant to the cuprate high temperature superconductors (materials that conduct electricity without resistance). I will also take advantage of the underlying 'matrix product state' structure of the technique to extend it to the emerging field of out-of-equilibrium quantum problems, where a system is 'quenched' by suddenly changing one of its properties (for example the strength of interactions).