It may be his last paper in USM but I strongly wish that it is not his last. There are still many follow up he can pursue, esp. if the paper could successfully arouse serious attention from the superconducting community. I suddenly feel sentimentally regretted of the fact that he is leaving the school of physics very soon, and I have not made good use of the opportunity to learn more condensed physics from him.
I am a slow learner who only picks up bits of condensed matter physics here and there inconsistently. Hence my comment on the details is at best like a pedestrian's. I recall in many occasion he mentioned to me the general ideas of his theory, with some key words like non-harmonic mode phonon-electric interaction, pseudo- gap, Hubbard model, Jahn-Teller effects and things like that. These technical details are now seen in the black-and-white form.
I pay particular attention to the statement in his paper the need for further numerical investigation of the model. I am slowing picking up some computational techniques here in TU Delft. Here I have been exposed to various computational techniques in condensed matter and statistical physics, such as monte carlo and quantum monte carlo techniques. My hope is to learn as much as generic computational techniques so that I can be technically competent to perform numerical computation on interesting condensed matter systems. (At the moment I am still far from computationally competent to attack serious research topics except maybe those of undergraduate level textbook problems.) Hence I am constantly looking for candidate Hamiltonians which I can make as topics worthy of investing computational effort in the future. As a matter of fact, the Hamiltonians in his papers are my favorite 'target', especially when they contain much avenue that are difficult to explore analytically.
I must admit that I lack much of the physics insights as Prof. Lee have demonstrated. But somehow I also naively thinks that to solve a given Hamiltonian numerically (such as his extended Hubbard model) is an easier task than deriving and providing physical insight of it. Somewhere in the literature review process I read about simulating Hubbard model numerically. It seems to be quite an interesting and a much challenging topic which is computationally expansive, and can run into (computer) memory problem easily. Non-trivial algorithms are necessary to simulate even the simplest Hubbard model (with more than a few degree of freedoms) using Lanczos diagonalisation or density matrix renormalisation group method or things like that. My feeling is that
computational Hubbard-like model is an enterprise by itself in computational statistical physics. To study his extended Hubbard Hamiltonian could even be a more daunting but not impossible task. I would not dare to say that I am capable of doing it, but I keep an open mind to attack this problem in the future.
Prof Lee once mentioned a question: why is his long term research unfunded and no research students? I would like to comment on the 'no research students' part. We all know that the current undergraduates are seriously under-trained during their undergraduate years. There are also many pragmatic reasons rendering them to chicken out from taking up challenging research topics like his which are considered 'super hard-core'. However, I would also like to add that this is in principle not a problem. We simply need more good marketing strategies to 'lure' potential students, and also lots of patient in guiding them.
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