Vitaly Gorelov
I'm a CNRS researcher in condensed matter physics at the Laboratoire des Solides Irradiés, École Polytechnique. I develop and apply quantum many-body methods to predict the optical and electronic properties of solids, with a strong focus on materials for photovoltaics.
My work sits at the intersection of many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). I use these methods to obtain accurate predictions for excitations in complex materials, to benchmark approximations like the GW approximation and the Bethe–Salpeter equation, and to build theoretical models that can scale to materials design — often in collaboration with experimentalists.
Day-to-day this means studying excitons and dielectric screening in layered oxides like V₂O₅, calculating band gaps and excitation spectra of molecular hydrogen at high pressure, and developing new response-theory approaches to electron charge dynamics and charge separation, which are central to photovoltaic absorbers.
News
- 2026 New paper from Muhammed Güneş, Ayoub Aouina, myself, Matteo Gatti and Lucia Reining on the use of Connector Theory to design explicit functionals is on arXiv:2605.02492
- 2026 New paper with L. Lacombe and L. Reining on charge dynamics and charge separation, out in SciPost Phys.
- 2025 Invited talk at the HANAMI workshop on materials science from first principles, Paris.
- 2024 Started the MINOTAURE project under the PEPR TASE programme, and welcomed three new PhD students to the Theoretical Spectroscopy group.
- 2024 Phys. Rev. B Letter on the electronic excitation spectra of molecular hydrogen in Phase I from QMC and MBPT (selected as Editor Suggestion).
- 2023 Appointed CNRS researcher (Chargé de Recherche, Section 9) at LSI, École Polytechnique.