arXiv:2305.06928 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B
Functional renormalization group without functional integrals: Implementing Hilbert space projections for strongly correlated electrons via Hubbard X-operators
Andreas Rückriegel, Jonas Arnold, Rüdiger Krämer, Peter Kopietz
The authors show here that exact functional renormalization group flow (FRG) equations for quantum systems can be derived directly within an operator formalism without using functional integrals. This simple insight opens new possibilities for applying FRG methods to models for strongly correlated electrons with projected Hilbert spaces, such as quantum spin models, the $t$-$J$ model, or the Hubbard model at infinite on-site repulsion. By representing these models in terms of Hubbard X-operators, various applications of this approach are explored.
The authors show here that exact functional renormalization group flow (FRG) equations for quantum systems can be derived directly within an operator formalism without using functional integrals. This simple insight opens new possibilities for applying FRG methods to models for strongly correlated electrons with projected Hilbert spaces, such as quantum spin models, the t-J model, or the Hubbard model at infinite on-site repulsion. By representing these models in terms of Hubbard X-operators, various applications of this approach are explored.
Strongly correlated electron systems host a plethora of fascinating physical phenomena and pose formidable challenges in their theoretical analysis. The challenges originate from the inherent complexity of the quantum many-body problem - no classical computer will ever be able to fully simulate these systems - and the lack of an effective single-particle picture, as the strong mutual interactions make it impossible to regard the electrons as independent from each other. As a consequence, most systems of correlated electrons can only be tackled approximately and numerically. In this thesis, we develop a set of numerical methods for strongly correlated electrons, which are inspired by the renormalization group (RG) idea of including degrees of freedom successively from high to low energies. This enables an efficient organization of the diverse fluctuations and is key for an accurate treatment of interacting quantum systems, where collective behavior and composite objects emerge at energy scales far below those of the microscopic constituents. In a first part, we consider the functional renormalization group (fRG), a versatile framework to study the flow of correlation functions upon modulating the underlying action. Though widely used, it has often acted more as a qualitative rather than quantitative method, due a nontransparent approximation induced by truncating the hierarchy of flow equations. We develop an iterative multiloop fRG (mfRG) scheme, which ameliorates this approximation and eliminates many of the drawbacks of fRG experienced hitherto. In particular, it restores the independence of results on the choice of RG regulator and establishes a rigorous relation to the parquet formalism. Furthermore, we show how to derive the flow equations directly from self-consistent many-body relations. This establishes a form of diagrammatic resummations at the two-particle level which circumvents ill-behaved two-particle-irreducible vertices. An application to the prototypical two-dimensional Hubbard model illustrates how our multiloop scheme elevates the fRG approach to correlated electron systems to a quantitative level. Secondly, we employ the numerical renormalization group (NRG), based on the iterative diagonalization of impurity Hamiltonians, in conjunction with the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) to describe local correlations in multiorbital systems. Having access to arbitrarily low temperatures and energies, NRG is a unique, real-frequency impurity solver for DMFT. It has been pivotal to the understanding of Hund metals, where strong correlations arise from Hund's rules even at moderate Coulomb repulsion. Building on recent methodological advances, we extend the range of application of DMFT+NRG from orbital-degenerate models to more realistic setups: We first study orbital differentiation in a three-orbital Hund-metal model and unravel key effects of the orbital-selective Mott transition. In a real-materials setting, we then incorporate the bandstructure from density functional theory (DFT) and analyze the archetypal Hund-metal material Sr2RuO4. We particularly follow its RG flow to the Fermi-liquid regime at previously inaccessible low temperatures and generally present DFT+DMFT+NRG as a new computational paradigm for strongly correlated materials. As a side project of our fRG work, we develop an algorithm to count Feynman diagrams from closed many-body relations, which reveals the surprising outcome that totally irreducible contributions are responsible for the factorial growth in the number of diagrams. Additionally, we use NRG to study transport through three-level quantum dots and provide benchmark data for other RG methods, which aim at further describing these systems in nonequilibrium.
Among the methods that treat strongly correlated electron systems, the functional renormalization group (fRG) has a desirable feature that it can take account of the shape of the Fermi surface with a systematic inclusion of diagrams. Specifically, the temperature-flow fRG due to Honerkamp et al can be a powerful method. In this method, an even mesh (patch discretization in the Cartesian coordinates) in κ space is desirable in general, but this has remained numerically difficult. To overcome the difficulty we have constructed a fast and stable algorithm, which becomes powerful at lower T or in the extended Hubbard model.
At strong on-site repulsion $ U $, the fermionic Hubbard model realizes an extremely correlated electron system. In this regime, it is natural to derive the low-energy physics with the help of non-canonical operators acting on a projected Hilbert space without double occupancies. Using a strong-coupling functional renormalization group technique, we study the physics of such extreme correlations in the strict $ U = \infty $ limit, where only kinematic interactions due to the Hilbert space projection remain. For nearest-neighbor hopping on a square lattice, we find that the electronic spectrum is significantly renormalized, with bandwidth and quasi-particle residue strongly decreasing with increasing electron density. On the other hand, damping and particle-hole asymmetry increase, while a polaronic continuum forms in the hole sector, below the single-particle band. Fermi liquid phenomenology applies only at low densities, where the system remains paramagnetic. At higher densities, we find a bad metal with strong magnetic correlations, indicating that the ground state is the Nagaoka ferromagnet at high densities and a stripe antiferromagnet at intermediate densities. Both in the paramagnetic and the ferromagnetic regimes, we observe a violation of Luttinger's theorem.
The functional renormalization group provides a nonperturbative and systematically improvable route to constructing density functionals for quantum many-body systems from microscopic Hamiltonians. Here we advance this program by benchmarking functional-renormalization-group density functional theory (FRG-DFT) against the exact thermodynamics of the single-site Bose-Hubbard model. This model provides an ideal testing ground because it is analytically solvable, yet remains subtle in the imaginary-time coherent-state path integral, where a naive continuum treatment generates a spurious self-interaction. We show that a careful Hubbard-Stratonovich derivation identifies the self-interaction correction term that must be included in the FRG-DFT flow to recover the exact thermodynamics. We then systematically compare several closures of the resulting hierarchy of flow equations for the free energy, chemical potential, and connected density correlators over broad ranges of density, temperature, and interaction strength. The benchmark shows that the free energy is comparatively robust, whereas the chemical potential and fluctuation observables provide much sharper diagnostics of the hierarchy closure. A maximum-entropy closure gives the most accurate overall description and reproduces even the low-temperature oscillatory structure of the connected two-density correlator. These results identify two general requirements for functional approaches to quantum thermodynamics: the renormalization group flow equation must retain the equal-time contact subtraction to avoid spurious self-interactions, and any closure of the hierarchy must preserve the statistical consistency of density correlators. This work provides a controlled foundation for deriving ab initio density functionals for quantum many-body systems across condensed-matter, ultracold-atom, and nuclear physics, as well as quantum chemistry.
Renormalization group methods are well-established tools for the (numerical) investigation of the low-energy properties of correlated quantum many-body systems, allowing us to capture their scale-dependent nature. The functional renormalization group (FRG) allows us to continuously evolve a microscopic model action to an effective low-energy action as a function of decreasing energy scales via an exact functional flow equation, which is then approximated by some truncation scheme to facilitate computation. Here, we report on our implementation of multiloop FRG, an extended truncation scheme recently developed for electronic FRG calculations, within the pseudofermion functional renormalization group (pf-FRG) framework for interacting quantum spin systems. We discuss in detail the conceptual intricacies of the flow equations generated by the multiloop truncation, as well as essential refinements to the integration scheme for the resulting integrodifferential equations. To benchmark our approach, we analyze antiferromagnetic Heisenberg models on the pyrochlore, simple cubic, and face-centered cubic lattice, discussing the convergence of physical observables for higher-loop calculations and comparing with existing results where available. Combined, these methodological refinements systematically improve the pf-FRG approach to one of the numerical tools of choice when exploring frustrated quantum magnetism in higher spatial dimensions.
We consider formulations of the functional renormalization-group (fRG) flow for correlated electronic systems with the dynamical mean-field theory as a starting point. We classify the corresponding renormalization-group schemes into those neglecting one-particle irreducible six-point vertices (with respect to the local Green’s functions) and neglecting one-particle reducible six-point vertices. The former class is represented by the recently introduced DMF 2 RG approach [31], but also by the scale-dependent generalization of the one-particle irreducible representation (with respect to local Green’s functions, 1PI-LGF) of the generating functional [20]. The second class is represented by the fRG flow within the dual fermion approach [16, 32]. We compare formulations of the fRG approach in each of these cases and suggest their further application to study 2D systems within the Hubbard model.