The treatment of intershell interactions remains a major challenge in the theoretical description of strongly correlated materials. Most previous approaches considered the influence of intershell interactions at best in a static fashion, neglecting dynamic effects. In this paper, we propose a slave-rotor method that goes beyond this approximation by incorporating the effect of intershell interactions in a dynamic manner. Our method is derived and implemented as a quantum impurity solver in the context of dynamical mean field theory and benchmarked on a two-orbital model system. The results from our slave-rotor technique are found to be in good agreement with our reference calculations that include intershell interactions explicitly. We identify and analyze qualitative features emerging from the dynamic treatment. Our results thus provide qualitative new insights, revealing the ambivalent effect of intershell interactions in strongly correlated materials.
The treatment of intershell interactions remains a major challenge in the theoretical description of strongly correlated materials. Most previous approaches considered the influence of intershell interactions at best in a static fashion, neglecting dynamic effects. In this paper, we propose a slave-rotor method that goes beyond this approximation by incorporating the effect of intershell interactions in a dynamic manner. Our method is derived and implemented as a quantum impurity solver in the context of dynamical mean field theory and benchmarked on a two-orbital model system. The results from our slave-rotor technique are found to be in good agreement with our reference calculations that include intershell interactions explicitly. We identify and analyze qualitative features emerging from the dynamic treatment. Our results thus provide qualitative new insights, revealing the ambivalent effect of intershell interactions in strongly correlated materials.
We introduce a representation of electron operators as a product of a spin-carrying fermion and of a phase variable dual to the total charge (slave quantum rotor). Based on this representation, a method is proposed for solving multiorbital Anderson quantum impurity models at finite interaction strength U. It consists in a set of coupled integral equations for the auxiliary field Green's functions, which can be derived from a controlled saddle point in the limit of a large number of field components. In contrast to some finite-U extensions of the noncrossing approximation, the method provides a smooth interpolation between the atomic limit and the weak-coupling limit, and does not display violation of causality at low frequency. We demonstrate that this impurity solver can be applied in the context of dynamical mean-field theory, at or close to half-filling. Good agreement with established results on the Mott transition is found, and large values of the orbital degeneracy can be investigated at low computational cost.
In this paper, we develop a new type of slave particle method which is similar to the slave rotor model except that the quantum rotor is substituted by a spin one slave particle. The spin-one slave particle itself can be represented in terms of Schwinger bosons/fermions. This approach is more conveniently applicable to the strongly correlated Hamiltonians with on-site Hubbard interaction and resolves the limitations of using the slave rotor model as well as the Anderson-Zou slave particle technique. For instance, the mean-field parameters of the slave spin method do not vanish above the Mott transition and this approach is smoothly connected to the non-interacting limit. As an example, we study the phase diagram of the Kane-Mele-Hubbard model using our current approach. In the absence of the spin-orbit interaction, the Mott transition occurs at Uc3t1. Several aspects of the slave spin method, its gauge theory and various possible mean-field states associated with this approach have been discussed.
Recent studies of dynamical screening of the electronic Coulomb interactions in solids have revived interest in lattice models of correlated fermions coupled to bosonic degrees of freedom (Hubbard-Holstein-type models). We propose a new dynamical mean-field-based approach to dynamically screened Coulomb interactions. In the effective Anderson-Holstein model, a transformation to slave rotors [S. Florens and A. Georges, Phys. Rev. B 66, 165111 (2002)] is performed to decouple the dynamical part of the interaction. This transformation allows for a systematic derivation and analysis of recently introduced approximate schemes for the solution of dynamical impurity problems, in particular, the Bose factor ansatz within the dynamic atomic limit approximation (DALA) with and without Lang-Firsov correction. More importantly still, it suggests an optimized choice for a Bose factor in the sense of the variational principle of Feynman and Peierls. We demonstrate the accuracy of our scheme and present a comparison to calculations within the DALA.
Correlated electron physics is intrinsically a multiscale problem, since high-energy electronic states screen the interactions between the correlated electrons close to the Fermi level, thereby reducing the magnitude of the interaction strength and dramatically shortening its range. Thus the handling of screening is an essential ingredient in the first-principles modeling of correlated electron systems. Screening is an intrinsically dynamic process and the corresponding downfolding methods such as the constrained random phase approximation indeed produce a dynamic interaction. However, many low-energy methods require an instantaneous interaction as input, which makes it necessary to map the fully dynamic interaction to an effective instantaneous interaction strength. It is not clear if and when such an effective model can capture the physics of the one with dynamic interaction and how to best perform the mapping. Here, we provide a systematic benchmark relevant to correlated materials, in the form of the Anderson impurity model. Overall, we find that a static approximation can be valid and that the moment-based approach recently proposed by Scott and Booth can be a good tool to find the value of the static interaction. We also identify physical regimes, especially under doping, where an instantaneous interaction cannot capture all of the relevant physics.
Exciton formation and condensation in a two band correlated model is studied using slave rotor mean field (SRMF) theory. In the SRMF theory, charge and spin degrees are treated as independent degrees of freedom. Using this, we capture the effective many body scales beyond conventional mean-field theory. While the formation of exciton is favoured by the hybridization, it is strongy influenced by the Coulomb repulsion between electrons in the two bands. Beyond a critical value of hybridization, there is complete coheherence among the electrons and holes signalling a condensation of excitons.
Theoretical studies of electron and energy transport in nanostructures usually involve nonequilibrium quantum impurity models, which feature a locally interacting quantum system (impurity) coupled to noninteracting bosonic and/or electronic baths each at its own equilibrium. In these models, the interplay of strong correlation, nonequilibrium effects and dissipation leads to rich and complex phenomena. As a nonequilibrium strongly correlated many-body problem, these models, except at some rare cases, have no exact analytical solution, and hence their treatment heavily relies upon numerical techniques. The goal of this thesis is to develop numerically accurate and relatively low-cost techniques for treatment of strongly correlated open nonequilibirum quantum systems. Such impurity solvers are in high demand both as standalone methods for simulation of response in nanoscale junctions and as part of divide-and-conquer schemes such as dynamical mean field theory (DMFT).For nonequilibirum open quantum systems, two characteristic energy scales governing the physics are intra-system interactions and strength of the system-baths couplings. Thus, systems strongly coupled to their baths with weak intra-system interactions or weakly coupled systems with strong local interactions can be treated within developed perturbation theory approaches. My research focuses on development of nonequilibirum dual techniques, which are capable to accurately treat situations where perturbative techniques are inapplicable due to absence of a small parameter in the system and which reduce to standard perturbative expansions in the limits of weak coupling or weak intra-system interaction. \tDual techniques rely on ability to solve exactly a simplified reference system. The latter includes exactly all intra-system interactions and accounts approximately for system-bath couplings. Dual techniques (described below) allow to account for deviation from the correct hybridization function in a organized and controlled manner of superperturbative expansion. Here, I use Markovian Lindbald quantum master equation (QME) as a solver for the reference system. In the thesis I discuss possibility of mapping between true non-Markov dynamics and simpler Markov Lindblad QME (mapping between physical and reference systems), numerical methods for the mapping and for solution of the resulting Lindblad QME, and application of the mapping in novel dual formulations: auxiliary-QME dual fermion and dual boson approaches. \tFirst I analytically prove that the continuous fermionic baths that the impurity is coupled to can be mapped onto a set of dissipative auxiliary modes under Lindblad QME. Based on this mapping, complicated non-Markovian dynamics of the open fermionic system can be treated by a much simpler Markovian Lindblad QME. However, nice mapping generally requires many auxiliary modes, and numerically only a small number of modes can be exactly diagonalized due to exponential increase of the Hilbert space. To perturbatively treat the difference between the true bath and the small-size auxiliary one, we introduce dual-fermion method. It can directly target the steady state and avoid long-time propagation. Besides current-voltage relation, it can also provide spectral functions, indicating itself as a potential impurity solver for DMFT. Furthermore, we generalize dual-fermion method to consider additionally the effects of bosonic environment; hence it is called dual-boson method. It can be used for studying electron-phonon interaction and light-matter interaction in nanojunctions. By comparing with numerically exact results we argue that both methods are very accurate and relatively cheap. \tFinally, matrix product state representation of the Lindblad QME enables us to treat a large number of auxiliary modes, which provide an exponentially improved mapping. Adding counting field to the auxiliary QME, we can compute the generating function of time-dependent full-counting statistics of electron transport, which yields not only electronic current but also higher-order cumulants (e.g., zero-frequency noise).