Efficient and Accurate Description of Electron Interactions Without Supercomputers

Researchers have developed an efficient and highly accurate method to describe interacting electron systems for crystalline materials, a long-standing challenge in condensed matter physics. The method, called bond-dependent slave-particle cluster theory, treats two or three bonded atoms at a time and connects the clusters together in a novel way to describe the entire system. Compared to literature benchmark calculations, the new method is three to four orders of magnitude faster and can be run on a student laptop. The researchers look forward to applying this method to more complex and realistic materials problems in the near future.