Continuing in the Centro Atomico Bariloche, he received his PhD in the field of High Energy Physics, specifically in lattice gauge theories.
He works in a Correlated Electron Group with Adriana Moreo,[5] and has had a joint appointment between the University of Tennessee (UT), Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) since 2004.
[15] Together with collaborators, he also developed new algorithms to study systems described by spin-fermion models, with a mixture of quantum and classical degrees of freedom, such as in the double exchange context used for materials in the central part of the 3d row of the periodic table.
[16] In 1992, Dagotto, in collaboration with José Riera and Doug Scalapino, opened the field of ladder compounds,[17] materials with atomic substructures containing two chains next to each other and with inter-ladder coupling (along rungs) of magnitude comparable to that in the long direction (along legs).
[15][22] In 1998, Dagotto developed the Monte Carlo techniques that allowed for the first computational studies of spin-fermion models for manganites, in collaboration with Seiji Yunoki and Adriana Moreo.
[23][24][25] More recently, similar Monte Carlo techniques have been employed by him and collaborators to study properties of iron-based superconductors, revealing the role of the lattice to stabilize the electronic nematic regime above the antiferromagnetic critical temperature.
[26] In a highly cited 2005 publication, Dagotto argued that the electronic degree of freedom in transition metal oxides and related materials displays characteristics similar to those of soft matter, where complex patterns arise from deceptively simple interactions.
Together with Pengcheng Dai and Jiangping Hu, in 2012 they were among the first to argue that the iron based high critical temperature superconductors are not located in the weak Hubbard coupling limit.
[31] With Julian Rincon, Jacek Herbrych and collaborators,[32][33] employing the density matrix renormalization group, they computationally discovered “block” states in low-dimensional multi-orbital Hubbard models.
He, together with Narayan Mohanta and Satoshi Okamoto, also reported Majoranas in a two-dimensional three-layer geometry with a skyrmion crystal at the bottom, an electron gas in the middle, and a standard superconductor at the top with a carved one-dimensional channel.
[37] Within topology in one dimension, he, Nirav Patel, and collaborators proposed a fermionic two-orbital electronic model that becomes the S=1 Haldane chain in strong Hubbard coupling,[38] and has similarities with the AKLT state of spin systems.