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arXiv:1110.3413 · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

Renormalization group flow equations with full momentum dependence

Jean-Paul Blaizot

Published Jun 6, 2011• 9 citations
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Abstract

After a short elementary introduction to the exact renormalization group for the effective action, I discuss a particular truncation of the hierarchy of flow equations that allows for the determination of the full momentum of the n-point functions. Applications are then briefly presented, to critical O(N) models, to Bose-Einstein condensation and to finite-temperature field theory.

DOI
10.1098/rsta.2011.0071

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After a short elementary introduction to the exact renormalization group for the effective action, I discuss a particular truncation of the hierarchy of flow equations that allows for the determination of the full momentum of the n-point functions. Applications are then briefly presented, to critical O(N) models, to Bose-Einstein condensation and to finite-temperature field theory.
The topic of this thesis is the functional renormalization group. We discuss some approximations schemes. Thereafter we apply these approximations to study different fields of condensed matter physics. Generally we have to evaluate an infinite set of vertex functions describing the scattering of particles. These vertex functions get renormalized away from their bare values governed by an infinite hierarchy of flow equations. We cannot expect to actually solve these equations but have to apply a couple of approximations. The aim is to somehow separate relevant contributions from irrelevant ones. One possible scheme opens up if we rescale fields and vertices. Here "relevance" is used in a quantitative way to describe the scaling behaviour of vertices close to a fixed point of the RG. One disadvantage of describing the system in terms of infinitely many vertices is that the majority of these vertices we have to evaluate are not of interest to us. In most cases we are just looking for the self-energy or the two-particle effective interaction. However there might be contributions to the flow of these vertices that are generated by irrelevant vertices. We generally assume that we can express irrelevant vertices in terms of the relevant and marginal ones. Then in turn it should be possible to write the contributions of these irrelevant vertices to the flow of relevant and marginal ones in terms of relevant and marginal vertices as well. We show how this can be achieved by what we term the adiabatic approximation. We now consider weakly interacting bosons at the critical point of Bose-Einstein condensation. As the transition takes place at a finite temperature this temperature defines an effective ultraviolet cut-off. For the investigation of physical properties that depend on momenta smaller than this cut-off it is therefore sufficient to describe the system by a classical field theory. Our central topic here is the self-energy of the bosons and we are able to evaluate it with the full momentum dependence. For small momenta it approaches a scaling form and as the momentum is gradually increased we observe a crossover to the perturbative regime. As a test for the reliability of our expression for the selfenergy we investigate the interaction induced shift of the critical. Our results compare quite satisfactory to the best available estimates for this shift. For the anomalous dimension our approach predicts the correct order of magnitude however with a considerable error. As an improvement we include more vertices into our calculations. Here we observe that our fixed point estimates indeed approach the best known results but this convergence is quite weak. We turn toward systems of interacting fermions. The formulation of the functional renormalization group implicitly requires knowledge of the true Fermi surface of the full interacting system. In general however we can just calculate it a-posteriori from the self-energy. The requirement to flow into a fixed point can be translated into a fine-tuning of the frequency/momentum independent part r_0 of the rescaled 2-point function. We show how this bare value is related to the momentum dependent effective interaction along the complete trajectory of the RG. On the other hand r_0 expresses the difference between the bare and the true Fermi surface. Putting both equations together results into an exact selfconsistency equation for the Fermi surface. We apply our self-consistency equation above to tackle the problem of finding the true Fermi surface of interacting fermions in low dimensions. The most simple non-trivial model with an inhomogeneous Fermi surface is a system of two coupled metallic chains. The process of interband backward scattering leads to a smoothing of the Fermi surface. Of special interest is if the Fermi momenta of the two bands collapse into just one value. We propose the term confinement transition for this behaviour. We bosonize the interband backward scattering by means of a Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation and treat our system as a single channel problem. This bosonization together with the adiabatic approximation allows us to investigate the system even at strong coupling. Within a simple one-loop treatment our method predicts a confinement transition at strong coupling. However taken vertex renormalizations into account we observe that this confinement is destroyed by fluctuations beyond one-loop. Actually we observe how the confined phase can be stabilized by the inclusion of interband umklapp scattering. Thereafter we consider the physically more relevant case of a two-dimensional system of infinitely many coupled metallic chains. Here the Fermi surface consists of two disconnected weakly curved sheets. We are able to repeat the calculations we have performed for our toy model. Within a self-consistent 2-loop calculation indeed signs for a confinement transition at finite coupling strength emerge.
The functional renormalization group is an ideal tool for dealing with the diversity of energy scales and competition of correlations in interacting Fermi systems. Starting point is an exact hierarchy of flow equations which yields the gradual evolution from a microscopic model Hamiltonian to the effective action as a function of a continuously decreasing energy cutoff. Suitable truncations of the hierarchy have recently led to powerful new approximation schemes. I review applications of the functional renormalization group to the two-dimensional Hubbard model and to one-dimensional Luttinger liquids with impurities.
Numerous correlated electron systems exhibit a strongly scale-dependent behavior. Upon lowering the energy scale, collective phenomena, bound states, and new effective degrees of freedom emerge. Typical examples include (i) competing magnetic, charge, and pairing instabilities in two-dimensional electron systems; (ii) the interplay of electronic excitations and order parameter fluctuations near thermal and quantum phase transitions in metals; and (iii) correlation effects such as Luttinger liquid behavior and the Kondo effect showing up in linear and nonequilibrium transport through quantum wires and quantum dots. The functional renormalization group is a flexible and unbiased tool for dealing with such scale-dependent behavior. Its starting point is an exact functional flow equation, which yields the gradual evolution from a microscopic model action to the final effective action as a function of a continuously decreasing energy scale. Expanding in powers of the fields one obtains an exact hierarchy of flow equations for vertex functions. Truncations of this hierarchy have led to powerful new approximation schemes. This review is a comprehensive introduction to the functional renormalization group method for interacting Fermi systems. A self-contained derivation of the exact flow equations is presented and frequently used truncation schemes are described. Reviewing selected applications it is shown how approximations based on the functional renormalization group can be fruitfully used to improve our understanding of correlated fermion systems.
We present an approximation scheme to solve the nonperturbative renormalization group equations and obtain the full momentum dependence of the n-point functions. It is based on an iterative procedure where, in a first step, an initial ansatz for the n-point functions is constructed by solving approximate flow equations derived from well motivated approximations. These approximations exploit the derivative expansion and the decoupling of high momentum modes. The method is applied to the O(N) model. In leading order, the self-energy is already accurate both in the perturbative and the scaling regimes. A stringent test is provided by the calculation of the shift DeltaTc in the transition temperature of the weakly repulsive Bose gas, a quantity which is particularly sensitive to all momentum scales. The leading order result is in agreement with lattice calculations, albeit with a theoretical uncertainty of about 25%.
We give a self-contained derivation of the differential equations for Wilson's renormalization group for the one-particle irreducible Green functions in fermionic systems. The application of this equation to the (t,t′)-Hubbard model appears in Ref. [HSFR]. Here we focus on theoretical aspects. After deriving the equations, we discuss the restrictions imposed by symmetries on the effective action. We discuss scaling properties due to the geometry of the Fermi surface and give precise criteria to determine when they justify the use of one-loop flows. We also discuss the relationship of this approach to other RG treatments, as well as aspects of the practical treatment of truncated equations, such as the projection to the Fermi surface and the calculation of susceptibilities.