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arXiv:0903.2414 · Physical Review B

Real-time simulations of nonequilibrium transport in the single-impurity Anderson model

Fabian Heidrich‐Meisner, Adrian E. Feiguin, Elbio R. Dagotto

Published Jun 29, 2009• 179 citations
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Abstract

One of the main open problems in the field of transport in strongly interacting nanostructures is the understanding of currents beyond the linear response regime. In this work, we consider the single-impurity Anderson model and use the adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method to compute real-time currents out of equilibrium. We first focus on the particle-hole symmetric point where Kondo correlations are the strongest and then extend the study of the nonequilibrium transport to the mixed-valence regime. As a main result, we present accurate data for the current-voltage characteristics of this model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.79.235336

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One of the main open problems in the field of transport in strongly interacting nanostructures is the understanding of currents beyond the linear response regime. In this work, we consider the single-impurity Anderson model and use the adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group method to compute real-time currents out of equilibrium. We first focus on the particle-hole symmetric point where Kondo correlations are the strongest and then extend the study of the nonequilibrium transport to the mixed-valence regime. As a main result, we present accurate data for the current-voltage characteristics of this model.
We study the single-impurity Anderson model out of equilibrium under the influence of a bias voltage ϕ and a magnetic field B . We investigate the interplay between the shift ( ) of the Kondo peak in the spin-resolved density of states (DOS) and the one ( ) of the conductance anomaly. In agreement with experiments and previous theoretical calculations we find that, while the latter displays a rather linear behavior with an almost constant slope as a function of B down to the Kondo scale, the DOS shift first features a slower increase reaching the same behavior as only for . Our auxiliary master equation approach yields highly accurate nonequilibrium results for the DOS and for the conductance all the way from within the Kondo up to the charge fluctuation regime, showing excellent agreement with a recently introduced scheme based on a combination of numerical renormalization group with time-dependent density matrix renormalization group.
We present a detailed comparison of three different methods designed to tackle non-equilibrium quantum transport, namely the functional renormalization group (fRG), the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) and the iterative summation of real-time path integrals (ISPI). For the non-equilibrium single-impurity Anderson model (including a Zeeman term at the impurity site), we demonstrate that the three methods are in quantitative agreement over a wide range of parameters at the particle–hole symmetric point as well as in the mixed-valence regime. We further compare these techniques with two quantum Monte Carlo approaches and the time-dependent numerical renormalization group method.
We apply the adaptive time-dependent density-matrix renormalization-group method (tDMRG) to the study of transport properties of quantum-dot systems connected to metallic leads. Finite-size effects make the usual tDMRG description of the Kondo regime a numerically demanding task. We show that such effects can be attenuated by describing the leads by ``Wilson chains,'' in which the hopping matrix elements decay exponentially away from the impurity $({t}_{n}\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}^{\ensuremath{-}n/2})$. For a given system size and in the linear-response regime, results for $\ensuremath{\Lambda}>1$ show several improvements over the undamped $\ensuremath{\Lambda}=1$ case: perfect conductance is obtained deeper in the strongly interacting regime and current plateaus remain well defined for longer time scales. Similar improvements were obtained in the finite-bias regime up to bias voltages of the order of the Kondo temperature. These results show that with the proposed modification, the tDMRG characterization of Kondo correlations in the transport properties can be substantially improved, while it turns out to be sufficient to work with much smaller system sizes. We discuss the numerical cost of this approach with respect to the necessary system sizes and the entanglement growth during the time evolution.
The numerical renormalization group (NRG) is tailored to describe interacting impurity models in equilibrium, but it faces limitations for steady-state nonequilibrium, arising, e.g., due to an applied bias voltage. We show that these limitations can be overcome by describing the thermal leads using a thermofield approach, integrating out high energy modes using NRG, and then treating the nonequilibrium dynamics at low energies using a quench protocol, implemented using the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group. This yields quantitatively reliable results for the current (with errors ≲3%) down to the exponentially small energy scales characteristic of impurity models. We present results of benchmark quality for the temperature and magnetic field dependence of the zero-bias conductance peak for the single-impurity Anderson model.
We study time-dependent electron transport through an Anderson model. The electronic interactions on the impurity site are included via the self-energy approximations at Hartree-Fock (HF), second Born (2B), GW, and TTT-matrix levels as well as within a time-dependent density functional (TDDFT) scheme based on the adiabatic Bethe-ansatz local density approximation (ABALDA) for the exchange-correlation potential. The Anderson model is driven out of equilibrium by applying a bias to the leads, and its nonequilibrium dynamics is determined by real-time propagation. The time-dependent currents and densities are compared to benchmark results obtained with the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) method. Many-body perturbation theory beyond HF gives results in close agreement with tDMRG, especially within the 2B approximation. We find that the TDDFT approach with the ABALDA approximation produces accurate results for the densities on the impurity site, but overestimates the currents. This problem is found to have its origin in an overestimation of the lead densities, which indicates that the exchange-correlation potential must attain nonzero values in the leads.
We study equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of the single-impurity Anderson model with a power-law pseudogap in the density of states. In equilibrium, the model is known to display a quantum phase transition from a generalized Kondo to a local moment phase. In the present work, we focus on the extension of these phases beyond equilibrium, i.e., under the influence of a bias voltage. Within the auxiliary master equation approach combined with a scheme based on matrix product states (MPS) we are able to directly address the current-carrying steady state. Starting with the equilibrium situation, we first corroborate our results by comparing to a direct numerical evaluation of ground-state spectral properties of the system by MPS. Here, a scheme to locate the phase boundary by extrapolating the power-law exponent of the self energy produces a very good agreement with previous results obtained by the numerical renormalization group. Our nonequilibrium study as a function of the applied bias voltage is then carried out for two points on either side of the phase boundary. In the Kondo regime the resonance in the spectral function is split as a function of the increasing bias voltage. The local moment regime, instead, displays a dip in the spectrum near the position of the chemical potentials. Similar features are observed in the corresponding self energies. The Kondo split peaks approximately obey a power-law behavior as a function of frequency whose exponents depend only slightly on voltage. Finally, the differential conductance in the Kondo regime shows a peculiar maximum at finite voltages, whose height, however, is below the accuracy level.