A review of the physical properties of small systems described by various model Hamiltonians is given. Their physical properties are found either exactly or by using Monte-Carlo methods, and are compared with properties of bulk systems. It is shown that (i) clusters differ in an essential way from the bulk, having electronic states strongly dependent on the geometry and cluster size, but, at the same time, (ii) important insights into the nature of electron correlation and low-energy excitations in solids may be gained by cluster studies. In particular, the cluster calculations allow one to identify the tendencies to various kinds of symmetry-broken states in the (extended) Hubbard model and give a simple qualitative understanding of the low temperature properties of the Kondo and the heavy-fermion systems. Furthermore, cluster calculations allow one to study such problems as the development of magnetic moment at chemisorbed atoms for strong correlations and the suppression of frustration by quantum fluctuations. Recently, cluster calculations gave important information about the possible role of charge transfer processes and magnetic interactions in the microscopic mechanism of pairing in high temperature superconducting oxides.
Three different approaches to correlated electron systems are presented.(i)The single impurity Anderson model is solved by a semi-analytical approach based on the flow equation method.(ii)A numerically implementable Multi-scale Many-Body approach to strongly correlated electron systems is introduced.An extension to quantum cluster methods, it approximates correlations on any given length-scale commensurate with the strength of the correlations on the respective scale.(iii) The spectral properties of the one-dimensional Holstein and breathing polaron models using the self-consistent Born approximation are presented.4.10 a) Energy levels for zero coupling (g = 0).The solid line shows the non-interacting electron dispersion, the dashed ones are one phonon + one electron states and the dotted one two phonons + one electron, etc. k 1 is the momentum where the electron dispersion reaches ω 0 and has the most significant contribution to the scattering at the first phonon threshold.k 2 is the value of momentum with significant contribution to the scattering at the second phonon threshold.b) For the polaron with momentum k the scattering with momentum q has a significant contribution.Although the polaron momentum is close to k F , thus k a = k -k F is small, q = k a + k b is large because k b which connects two points on the Fermi surface can be large. . . . . . . . . . .