Nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory based on weak-coupling perturbation expansions: Application to dynamical symmetry breaking in the Hubbard model
We discuss the general formalism and validity of weak-coupling perturbation theory as an impurity solver for nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory. The method is implemented and tested in the Hubbard model, using expansions up to fourth order for the paramagnetic phase at half filling and third order for the antiferromagnetic and paramagnetic phase away from half filling. We explore various types of weak-coupling expansions and examine the accuracy and applicability of the methods for equilibrium and nonequilibrium problems. We find that in most cases an expansion of local self-energy diagrams including all the tadpole diagrams with respect to the Weiss Green's function (bare-diagram expansion) gives more accurate results than other schemes such as self-consistent perturbation theory using the fully interacting Green's function (bold-diagram expansion). In the paramagnetic phase at half filling, the fourth-order bare expansion improves the result of the second-order expansion in the weak-coupling regime, while both expansions suddenly fail at some intermediate interaction strength. The higher-order bare perturbation is especially advantageous in the antiferromagnetic phase near half filling. We use the third-order bare perturbation expansion within the nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory to study dynamical symmetry breaking from the paramagnetic to the antiferromagnetic phase induced by an interaction ramp in the Hubbard model. The results show that the order parameter, after an initial exponential growth, exhibits an amplitude oscillation around a nonthermal value followed by a slow drift toward the thermal value. The transient dynamics seems to be governed by a nonthermal critical point, associated with a nonthermal universality class, which is distinct from the conventional Ginzburg-Landau theory.
We discuss the general formalism and validity of weak-coupling perturbation theory as an impurity solver for nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory. The method is implemented and tested in the Hubbard model, using expansions up to fourth order for the paramagnetic phase at half filling and third order for the antiferromagnetic and paramagnetic phase away from half filling. We explore various types of weak-coupling expansions and examine the accuracy and applicability of the methods for equilibrium and nonequilibrium problems. We find that in most cases an expansion of local self-energy diagrams including all the tadpole diagrams with respect to the Weiss Green's function (bare-diagram expansion) gives more accurate results than other schemes such as self-consistent perturbation theory using the fully interacting Green's function (bold-diagram expansion). In the paramagnetic phase at half filling, the fourth-order bare expansion improves the result of the second-order expansion in the weak-coupling regime, while both expansions suddenly fail at some intermediate interaction strength. The higher-order bare perturbation is especially advantageous in the antiferromagnetic phase near half filling. We use the third-order bare perturbation expansion within the nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory to study dynamical symmetry breaking from the paramagnetic to the antiferromagnetic phase induced by an interaction ramp in the Hubbard model. The results show that the order parameter, after an initial exponential growth, exhibits an amplitude oscillation around a nonthermal value followed by a slow drift toward the thermal value. The transient dynamics seems to be governed by a nonthermal critical point, associated with a nonthermal universality class, which is distinct from the conventional Ginzburg-Landau theory.
Simulating nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems remains a major challenge due to the exponential growth of the computational complexity with real time. Here we implement a nonequilibrium impurity solver based on the weak-coupling expansion and the tensor cross interpolation (TCI), and apply it to nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). The method approximates the integrands of the high-dimensional integrals arising in the weak-coupling expansion in a tensor-train form, enabling efficient evaluations without stochastic sampling and thereby mitigating the sign problem affecting continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo (CT-QMC) methods. Benchmark calculations for an exactly solvable nonequilibrium impurity model agree well with the exact results and reveal a low-rank structure of the integrands. When applied to interaction-quench problems in the half-filled Hubbard model, the method reproduces fast thermalization at a critical interaction strength with accuracy comparable to CT-QMC. Away from half filling, where the sign problem becomes even more severe, the present approach remains well controlled, revealing a crossover instead of a sharply defined fast thermalization point in the 3/4-filled case. The solver can also be applied to steady-state DMFT problems, yielding accurate spectral functions in the metallic regime without analytic continuation.
Dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) is a widely used, nonperturbative computational framework for strongly correlated electron systems. This thesis extends DMFT in two directions: treating disorder and higher-order correlators away from equilibrium, and using near-term quantum computers as impurity solvers. In the first part, we develop two methodological advances for the nonequilibrium DMFT treatment of disordered, interacting systems. The first overcomes the central computational bottleneck of the recently developed nonequilibrium DMFT plus coherent potential approximation (DMFT+CPA) by replacing its explicit numerical disorder averaging with an exact analytical integration, exploiting a normalization property of the Schwinger-Keldysh contour; applied to a disorder-and-interaction quench of the Anderson-Hubbard model, this reveals that weak random disorder promotes thermalization. The second demonstrates that the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) can be successfully computed within the existing DMFT+CPA framework, by generalizing the Schwinger-Keldysh contour to a double-folded structure; as a proof-of-principle demonstration, weak disorder is found to accelerate the OTOC's decay in the half-filled Anderson-Hubbard model in the intermediate-coupling regime. In the second part, we explore the use of near-term quantum computers as DMFT impurity solvers. A stable real-time DMFT iteration scheme, designed for compatibility with quantum hardware, is first developed and validated classically against the metal-to-insulator transition. A symmetry-adapted variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is then benchmarked as the Anderson impurity solver for the converged DMFT Hamiltonian, and is found to reproduce ground-state energies accurately and to extract the single-particle Green's function reliably at intermediate to strong coupling, while accurate ground-state energies are shown not to guarantee accurate dynamics at weak coupling, a key challenge for extending such approaches to correlated metals. Together, we demonstrate that DMFT can be methodologically extended to study disordered and interacting systems away from equilibrium, and to incorporate near-term quantum hardware as a genuinely new computational resource to enhance its capabilities.
In a previous work [N. H. Tong, Phys. Rev. B 92 (2015) 165126], an equation-of-motion-based series expansion formalism was used to do the second-order strong-coupling expansion for the single-particle Green function of the Anderson impurity model (AIM). In this paper, we improve this theory in two aspects. We first use a more accurate scheme to self-consistently calculate the averages that appear in [Formula: see text]. In the resummation process, we use updated coefficients for the continued fraction (CF), guided by the formally exact CF from the Mori–Zwanzig theory. These changes lead to more accurate impurity spin responses to the magnetic bias of the bath. Combined with the dynamical mean-field theory, our theory gives improved description for the antiferromagnetism of Hubbard model at half-filling.
This work is motivated by the fact that the investigation of non-equilibrium phenomena in strongly correlated electron systems has developed into one of the most active and exciting branches of condensed matter physics as it provides rich new insights that could not be obtained from the study of equilibrium situations. However, a theoretical description of those phenomena is missing. Therefore, in this thesis, we develop a numerical method that can be used to study two minimal models -- the Hubbard model and the Anderson impurity model with general parameter range and time dependence. We begin by introducing the theoretical framework and the general features of the Hubbard model. We then describe the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), which was first invented by Georges in 1992. It provides a feasible way to approach strongly correlated electron systems and reduces the complexity of the calculations via a mapping of lattice models onto quantum impurity models subject to a self-consistency condition. We employ the non-equilibrium extension of DMFT and map the Hubbard model to the single impurity Anderson model (SIAM). Since the fundamental component of the DMFT method is a solver of the single impurity Anderson model, we continue with a description of the formalism to study the real-time dynamics of the impurity model staring at its thermal equilibrium state. We utilize the non-equilibrium strong-coupling perturbation theory and derive semi-analytical approximation methods such as the non-crossing approximation (NCA) and the one-crossing approximation (OCA). We then use the Quantum Monte-Carlo method (QMC) as a numerically exact method and present proper measurements of local observables, current and Green's functions. We perform simulations of the current after a quantum quench from equilibrium by rapidly applying a bias voltage in a wide range of initial temperatures. The current exhibits short equilibrium times and saturates upon the decrease of temperature at all times, indicating Kondo behavior both in the transient regime and in the steady state. However, this bare QMC solver suffers from a dynamical sign problem for long time propagations. To overcome the limitations of this bare treatment, we introduce the ``Inchworm algorithm'', based on iteratively reusing the information obtained in previous steps to extend the propagation to longer times and stabilize the calculations. We show that this algorithm greatly reduces the required order for each simulation and re-scales the exponential challenge to quadratic in time. We introduce a method to compute Green's functions, spectral functions, and currents for inchworm Monte Carlo and show how systematic error assessments in real time can be obtained. We illustrate the capabilities of the algorithm with a study of the behavior of quantum impurities after an instantaneous voltage quench from a thermal equilibrium state. We conclude with the applications of the unbiased inchworm impurity solver to DMFT calculations. We employ the methods for a study of the one-band paramagnetic Hubbard model on the Bethe lattice in equilibrium, where the DMFT approximation becomes exact. We begin with a brief introduction of the Mott metal insulator phase diagram. We present the results of both real time Green's functions and spectral functions from our nonequilibrium calculations. We observe the metal-insulator crossover as the on-site interaction is increased and the formation of a quasi-particle peak as the temperature is lowered. We also illustrate the convergence of our algorithms in different aspects.
We solve the impurity problem which arises within nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory for the Hubbard model by means of a self-consistent perturbation expansion around the atomic limit. While the lowest order, known as the noncrossing approximation (NCA), is reliable only when the interaction U is much larger than the bandwidth, low-order corrections to the NCA turn out to be sufficient to reproduce numerically exact Monte Carlo results in a wide parameter range that covers the insulating phase and the metal-insulator crossover regime at not too low temperatures. As an application of the perturbative strong-coupling impurity solver we investigate the response of the double occupancy in the Mott insulating phase of the Hubbard model to a dynamical change in the interaction or the hopping, a technique which has been used as a probe of the Mott insulating state in ultracold fermionic gases.
We use nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory with iterative perturbation theory as an impurity solver to study the recovery of SU(2) symmetry in real time following a hopping integral parameter quench from a mass-imbalanced to a mass-balanced single-band Hubbard model at half filling. A dynamical order parameter $\ensuremath{\gamma}(t)$ is defined to characterize the evolution of the system towards SU(2) symmetry. By comparing the momentum-dependent occupation from an equilibrium calculation [with the SU(2) symmetric Hamiltonian after the quench at an effective temperature] with the data from our nonequilibrium calculation, we conclude that the SU(2) symmetry recovered state is a thermalized state. Further evidence from the evolution of the density of states supports this conclusion. We find the order parameter in the weak Coulomb interaction regime undergoes an approximate exponential decay. We numerically investigate the interplay of the relevant parameters (initial temperature, Coulomb interaction strength, initial mass-imbalance ratio) and their combined effect on the thermalization behavior. Finally, we study evolution of the order parameter as the hopping parameter is changed with either a linear ramp or a pulse. Our results can be useful in strategies to engineer the relaxation behavior of interacting quantum many-particle systems.