14.03.2022

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - A computational perspective on the fruit fly of electronic correlations

In a recent review, an international team of scientist, including researchers from the University of Tübingen, gives a perspective on the progress of numerical analysis on the Hubbard model, a minimal model for electronic correlations, over the last two decades.

Reductionism is not only a well-known theoretical scientific paradigm. It also gives, like Einstein’s famous quote cited in the headline, practical guidance for tackling complex problems: reduce the problem at hand to its fundamental constituents before trying to solve it. In reality this often goes hand in hand with finding so-called model systems that capture the essence of the complex phenomenon to be analyzed. A prominent example is Drosophila melanogaster (commonly known as the fruit fly), which has only four pairs of chromosomes, making it particularly suited for studying classical genetics.