Gianpaolo Gobbo

I took my Master degree in Theoretical Physics at the University of Padua with a thesis on “Fluctuation Relations in non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics” under the supervision of Prof. Amos Maritan. In November 2009, I joined the Statistical and Biological Physics group in SISSA (Trieste) as a PhD student. My research interest are devoted to the development and interdisciplinary application of techniques borrowed from Statistical Mechanics and from the Theory of Stochastic Processes.




Research project: A unified path-integral approach to quantum tunneling and classical rare events

One of the big challenges in the computer simulation of molecular systems is a proper account of rare events occurring with a frequency that may be several orders of magnitude smaller than that of typical molecular vibrations. Exploiting a path -integral approach to the overdamped Langevin dynamics Prof. Stefano Baroni (SISSA-Condensed Matter Group) and Prof. Alessandro Laio have developed a scheme whereby absolute transition rates can be evaluated exactly. Together with them I’m involved in completing the formulation of this method for the classical dynamics of rare events, and to apply it to real-world instances such as chemical reactivity in solution. Further development would be to exploit the isomorphism between the Fokker-Planck equation and the Schroedinger equation in order to apply the method to phenomena such as collective tunneling in quantum many-body systems.