From Wen's QFT of Many-Body Systems
In the 1980s, a workstation with 32 Mbyte RAM could solve a system of eleven interacting electrons. After twenty years the computing power has increased 100-fold, which allows us to solve a system with merely two more electrons.
The energy eigenvalues of a system containing 200 interacting electrons are distributed in a range of about 200 eV. The system has at least 2^200 energy levels. The level spacing is about 200 eV / 2^200 = 10^(-60) eV. Had we spent a time equal to the age of the universe in measuring the energy, then, due to the energy-time uncertainty relation, we could only achieve an energy resolution of order 10^(-33) eV.
Comments