Today, I will introduce a new kind of post at Nerd Wisdom, that I hope to do more of in the future: the tutorial. These posts will be a little more technical than ordinary posts, and will probably run a little longer as well. They are designed to give the intelligent and well-educated scientist an entry into a field for which he or she is not already a specialist.
When working with graduate-student interns, I find myself presenting these types of tutorials constantly. Unfortunately, this type of material is very hard to find in the literature, because it covers material that is too well-known to the specialist, while sometimes being beyond what is available in textbooks. Thus, there tends to be an artificial barrier to entry into new fields.
My first tutorial will cover the Hubbard Model. To keep this post to a reasonable length, I will just include the first part of the tutorial here.
I previously discussed high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates, and mentioned that the detailed mechanism is still controversial. However, what is widely agreed is that, as originally proposed by P.W. Anderson, a good model for these materials is the Hubbard Model (see this paper by Anderson for an entertaining and readable argument in favor of this point). And even if one doesn’t agree with that statement, the Hubbard Model is of enormous intrinsic interest, as perhaps the simplest model of interacting electrons on a lattice.
Despite its simplicity, physicists have not been able to solve for the behavior of the two or three-dimensional Hubbard model in the “thermodynamic limit” (for lattices with a very large number of sites and electrons). Coming up with a reliable approach to solving the Hubbard model has become a kind of holy grail of condensed matter theory.
Note that this is very different from the situation for the classical ferromagnetic Ising model, for which Onsager solved the two-dimensional version exactly in 1944 but where we do not have an exact solution in three dimensions. For the three-dimensional Ising model, we may not have an exact solution, but we understand extremely well the qualitative behavior, and can compute quantitative results to practically arbitrary accuracy. For the Hubbard model, we do not even have know what the qualitative behavior is for two or three dimensional lattices.
I will first describe the model in words, and then show you how to solve for the quantum statistical mechanics of the simplest non-trivial version of the model: the Hubbard model on a lattice with just two sites. I strongly believe that whenever you want to learn about a new algorithm or theory, you should start by solving, and understanding in detail, the smallest non-trivial version that you can construct.
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