10.

6 Discussion and Outlook 575

that the propagator of the non-interacting system

(10.71)

scales accordingly [295, 2701. Since sums over products of GQ,oap-

pear in consecutive orders of perturbation theory, it is easy to ac-
cept that such contributions become negligible in the limit D + 00,
unless the site indices coincide. The resulting real-space collapse of
perturbation-theoretical contributions is the underlying reason why the
infinite-dimensional Hubbard model poses a simpler problem than its
finite-dimensional counterparts [272]. It is intuitively clear that the
simplification arises because the lattice model becomes equivalent to an
effective single-site model. It remains, however, a difficult problem to
solve. The effective on-site model in question can be understood as an
Anderson impurity model, where the impurity is subject to a fluctuating
effective field. Owing to the complicated frequency-dependence of the
effective field one should, in principle, impose an unlimited number of
self-consistency conditions. All methods of solution amount to keeping
a finite (and not necessarily large) number of conditions. For certain
quantities the results may be regarded as numerically exact, while for
small energy scales (like the effective bandwidth which is expected to
vanish near the Mott transition) the character of the solution is the
subject of continuing debate.
The reason why the Hubbard model remains non-trivial even in the
limit of infinite dimensionality, can be traced to the on-site character of
the interaction. For models with intersite interactions between localized
degrees of freedom27, the limit D + 00 brings great simplification be-
cause fluctuations of order 1 / a become negligible, and thus the usual
mean field approximation becomes exact. In contrast, here we are deal-
ing with itinerant degrees of freedom, and the purely on-site interaction
UfijtfijiLjl apparently does not care about the number of neighbours. For
this reason, the dynamics of the Hubbard model remains complicated
even in D = 00. Still, there is a subtler sense, embodied in the effective
impurity model, in which the limit D + 00 permits a simpler, mean-

"The spin models of magnetic ordering are an important example. See Ch. 6.