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arXiv:2011.05311 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Nonlocal correlation effects in fermionic many-body systems: Overcoming the noncausality problem

Steffen Backes, Jae-Hoon Sim, Silke Biermann

Published Jun 10, 2022• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Motivated by the intriguing physics of quasi-two-dimensional fermionic systems, such as high-temperature superconducting oxides, layered transition metal chalcogenides, or surface or interface systems, the development of many-body computational methods geared at including both local and nonlocal electronic correlations has become a rapidly evolving field. It has been realized, however, that the success of such methods can be hampered by the emergence of noncausal features in the effective or observable quantities involved. Here, we present an approach wherein local many-body techniques such as dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) are extended to nonlocal correlations and interactions, which preserves causality and has a physically intuitive interpretation. Our strategy has implications for the general class of DMFT-inspired many-body methods and can be adapted to cluster, dual boson, or dual fermion techniques with minimal effort.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.105.245115

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Motivated by the intriguing physics of quasi-two-dimensional fermionic systems, such as high-temperature superconducting oxides, layered transition metal chalcogenides, or surface or interface systems, the development of many-body computational methods geared at including both local and nonlocal electronic correlations has become a rapidly evolving field. It has been realized, however, that the success of such methods can be hampered by the emergence of noncausal features in the effective or observable quantities involved. Here, we present an approach wherein local many-body techniques such as dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) are extended to nonlocal correlations and interactions, which preserves causality and has a physically intuitive interpretation. Our strategy has implications for the general class of DMFT-inspired many-body methods and can be adapted to cluster, dual boson, or dual fermion techniques with minimal effort.
In strongly correlated materials, quantum fluctuations taking place at the level of atomic sites play a central role. These local processes are captured nonperturbatively in dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). Nonlocal mechanisms, however, are also suspected to be essential for the proper description of some of these materials, including the well-known high-temperature cuprate superconductors and the more exotic systems of atoms adsorbed on semiconducting surfaces.In this thesis, the effect of nonlocal, potentially long-range fluctuations beyond the DMFT framework is investigated from two angles.First, long-ranged interactions in adatom systems, computed from first principles within the constrained random-phase approximation (cRPA), are treated within the extended DMFT (EDMFT) framework and its combination with the diagrammatic GW method (GW +EDMFT). They are shown to explain some material trends observed in these compounds. In addition, thanks to the spatial and temporal information delivered by GW+EDMFT, they solve existing puzzles raised by different experimental conclusions drawn from different probes.Second, a new approach to the Hubbard model including nonlocal correlation effects is proposed. Formally based on the local expansion of the triply-irreducible functional, this approach, dubbed TRILEX, approximates the renormalized three-leg electron-boson vertex by a local but frequency-dependent vertex computed from an impurity model with retarded density-density and spin-spin interactions. This local vertex is used to construct frequency- and momentum-dependent self-energies capturing nonlocal correlation effects. By construction, this method reconciles two theoretical pictures of cuprate superconductors, namely the spin fluctuation theory at weak interaction strengths and the doped-Mott-insulator picture at strong coupling.This novel approach is applied to the single-band Hubbard model. It is shown to reduce to DMFT at strong coupling and high temperatures, and to fluctuation-exchange theories at weak coupling, while substantial deviations from both limits are observed at intermediate coupling. There, upon doping, antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations are observed to lead to a momentum-differentiated spectral intensity on the Fermi surface, which is reminiscent of the formation of Fermi arcs in photoemission measurements on cuprate superconductors.These two methodological developments are intrinsically linked to algorithmic aspects which are reviewed in the last part of this work. In particular, an open-source library dedicated to massively parallel computations in the field of quantum many-body physics, TRIQS, is presented, with a focus on error estimation through the binning and jackknife methods. The hybridization-expansion continuous-time quantum Monte-Carlo algorithm in the segment picture -- central to the TRILEX method -- and its state-of-the-art implementation are explained. Finally, as a further illustration, a new lightweight method relying on this algorithm and designed for realistic systems, the combined screened-exchange and dynamical DMFT method (SEx+DDMFT), is presented together with an application to the BaCo2As2 compound.
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In this lecture we give an introduction to theoretical description of strongly correlated materials based on dynamical mean-¿eld theory (DMFT) and its extensions.The goal of this theoretical construction is to retain the many-body aspects of local atomic physics within the extended solid.The effects of short-range non-local correlations within cluster extensions of the DMFT scheme, as well as long-range Àuctuations within the fully renormalized dual-fermion perturbation scheme are discussed extensively.Recent progress in the numerical solution of the DMFT effective quantum impurity problem within the recently developed continuous-time Quantum Monte Carlo schemes is reviewed.We then describe realistic extensions of this approach which combine the accuracy of ¿rst-principle Density-Functional Theory with the treatment of local many-body effects within DMFT.
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