Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

David Yllanes
University of Madrid

Citation:

"For developing and applying new computational methods to diluted Ising ferromagnets and spin glasses while presenting this material with exceptional clarity. This includes the novel tethered Monte Carlo algorithm as well as implementing detailed low level simulations on the Janus special purpose computer"

Background:

David Yllanes was born in Corunna (Spain) in 1984. He received his Licenciatura en Física from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2007, where he also obtained a PhD in 2011, under the supervision of Luis Antonio Fernández and Víctor Martín Mayor. David's thesis was on the topic of rugged free-energy landscapes, investigating both their equilibrium profiles and their impact on the extremely slow dynamics of disordered spin systems.

One of the main contributions is the introduction of the Tethered Monte Carlo method, a general strategy to manage systems with rugged free-energy landscapes. This method was demonstrated for the diluted antiferromagnet in a field.  The second main contribution was a detailed study of the low-temperature phase of the Edwards-Anderson spin glass. This work was based on very large-scale simulations, carried out with the Janus special-purpose computer. As an example, the dynamical evolution was followed for times ranging from the picosecond to the tenth of a second.

Currently, David is a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Giorgio Parisi, at La Sapienza University of Rome, where he continues to work on the statistical mechanics of complex systems.

David is an APS member since 2009 and was supported by an FPU fellowship during his doctorate.  Past honors include the Extraordinary Prizes for his high-school and undergraduate studies.