Experimentally Identifying Effective Theories in Many-Body Systems

Experimental setup at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at Heidelberg University. Alexis Bonnin - One goal of science is to find physical descriptions of nature by studying how basic system components interact with one another. For complex many-body systems, effective theories are frequently used to this end. They allow describing the interactions without having to observe a system on the smallest of scales. Physicists at Heidelberg University have now developed a new method that makes it possible to identify such theories experimentally with the aid of so-called quantum simulators. The results of the research effort, led by Markus Oberthaler (experimental physics) and Jürgen Berges (theoretical physics), were published in the journal "Nature Physics". Deriving predictions about physical phenomena at the level of individual particles from a microscopic description is practically impossible for large systems.