We develop a Monte Carlo framework to analyze the statistics of quantum work in correlated electron systems. Using the Ising-Kondo model in heavy fermions as a paradigmatic platform, we thoroughly illustrate the process of determining the moment generating function of quantum work under nonequilibrium conditions in detail. Based on this function, we systematically investigate essential statistical quantities, including the mean irreversible work density, the mean work density, variance, and the third central moment of quantum work across different quench processes. Our findings highlight distinct singularities in these quantities at the metal-insulator phase transition point at low temperatures. However, these singularities disappear, and the transition becomes a smooth crossover at high temperatures. This stark contrast underscores quantum work as an effective thermodynamic tool for identifying metal-insulator phase transitions. Our approach provides a promising new framework for investigating nonequilibrium quantum thermodynamics in strongly correlated electron systems.
We develop a Monte Carlo framework to analyze the statistics of quantum work in correlated electron systems. Using the Ising-Kondo model in heavy fermions as a paradigmatic platform, we thoroughly illustrate the process of determining the moment generating function of quantum work under nonequilibrium conditions in detail. Based on this function, we systematically investigate essential statistical quantities, including the mean irreversible work density, the mean work density, variance, and the third central moment of quantum work across different quench processes. Our findings highlight distinct singularities in these quantities at the metal-insulator phase transition point at low temperatures. However, these singularities disappear, and the transition becomes a smooth crossover at high temperatures. This stark contrast underscores quantum work as an effective thermodynamic tool for identifying metal-insulator phase transitions. Our approach provides a promising new framework for investigating nonequilibrium quantum thermodynamics in strongly correlated electron systems.
Describing correlated electron systems near phase transitions has been a major challenge in computational condensed-matter physics. In this paper, we apply highly accurate fixed-node quantum Monte Carlo techniques, which directly work with many-body wave functions and simulate electron correlations, to investigate the metal-to-insulator transition of a correlated hydrogen lattice. By calculating spin and charge properties, and analyzing the low-energy Hilbert space, we identify the transition point and identify order parameters that can be used to detect the transition. Our results provide a benchmark for density functional theories seeking to treat correlated electron systems.
In this thesis, several cases of non-equilibrium phenomena and quantum phase transitions in strongly correlated electron systems are analyzed. The unconventional critical behavior near magnetic quantum phase transitions in various heavy-fermion metals has triggered proposals on the breakdown of the Kondo effect at the critical point. In part I, we investigate, within one specific scenario, the fate of such a zero-temperature transition upon coupling of the electronic to lattice degrees of freedom. We study a Kondo-Heisenberg model with volume-dependent Kondo coupling � this model displays both Kondo volume collapse and Kondo-breakdown transitions. Within a large-N treatment, we find that the Kondo breakdown transition remains of second order except for very soft lattices. Finally, we relate our findings to current heavy-fermion experiments. Using non-equilibrium Green�s functions, we derive transport equations for the degrees of freedom participating in the quantum critical region of the Kondo breakdown transition. We discuss conditions under which the transport of electrical charge is described by the independent motion of conduction electrons and auxiliary bosons. Under these conditions, we derive a semiclassical transport equation for the bosons and quantitatively discuss the electrical conductivity of the whole system. Motivated by pressure experiments on FeAs-122 superconductors, in part II we propose a scenario based on local-moment physics to explain salient features at the magnetic phase boundary of CaFe2As2. In this scenario, the low-pressure magnetic phase derives from Fe moments, which become screened in the paramagnetic high-pressure phase. The quantum phase transition can be described as an orbital-selective Mott transition, which is rendered first order by coupling to the lattice. These ideas are illustrated by a suitable mean-field analysis of an Anderson lattice model. An analytical description of non-equilibrium phenomena in interacting quantum systems is rarely possible. In part III we present one example where such a description can be achieved, namely the ferromagnetic Kondo model. In equilibrium, this model is tractable via perturbative renormalization-group techniques. We employ a recently developed extension of the flow-equation method to calculate the non-equilibrium decay of the local magnetization at zero temperature. The flow equations admit analytical solutions which become exact at short and long times, in the latter case revealing that the system always retains a memory of its initial state. Finally, in part IV we analyze the Nernst effect resulting from normal state quasiparticles in the cuprates in presence of various types of translational symmetry breaking. In the electron-doped cuprates, the Nernst signal resulting from a reconstruction of the Fermi surface due to spin density wave order is discussed. An order parameter consistent with the reconstruction of the Fermi surface detected in electron-doped materials is shown to sharply enhance the Nernst signal close to optimal doping. Within a semiclassical treatment, the obtained magnitude and position of the enhanced Nernst signal agrees with Nernst measurements in electron-doped cuprates. In the hole-doped cuprates, we discuss relations between the normal-state Nernst effect and stripe order. We find that Fermi pockets caused by translational symmetry breaking lead to a strongly enhanced Nernst signal with a sign depending on the modulation period of the ordered state and other details of the Fermi surface. This implies differences between antiferromagnetic and charge-only stripes. We compare our findings with recent data from La1.6−xNd0.4SrxCuO4 and YBa2Cu3Oy.
The emerging field of quantum thermodynamics is contributing important results and insights into archetypal many-body problems, including quantum phase transitions. Still, the question whether out-of-equilibrium quantities, such as fluctuations of work, exhibit critical scaling after a sudden quench in a closed system has remained elusive. Here, we take a novel approach to the problem by studying a quench across an impurity quantum critical point. By performing density matrix renormalization group computations on the two-impurity Kondo model, we are able to establish that the irreversible work produced in a quench exhibits finite-size scaling at quantum criticality. This scaling faithfully predicts the equilibrium critical exponents for the crossover length and the order parameter of the model, and, moreover, implies an exponent for the rescaled irreversible work. By connecting the irreversible work to the two-impurity spin correlation function, our findings can be tested experimentally.
The study of strongly correlated quantum many-body systems is an outstanding challenge. Highly accurate results are needed for the understanding of practical and fundamental problems in condensed-matter physics, high energy physics, material science, quantum chemistry and so on. Our familiar mean-field or perturbative methods tend to be ineffective. Numerical simulations provide a promising approach for studying such systems. The fundamental difficulty of numerical simulation is that the dimension of the Hilbert space needed to describe interacting systems increases exponentially with the system size. Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are one of the best approaches to tackle the problem of enormous Hilbert space. They have been highly successful for boson systems and unfrustrated spin models. For systems with fermions, the exchange symmetry in general causes the infamous sign problem, making the statistical noise in the computed results grow exponentially with the system size. This hinders our understanding of interesting physics such as high-temperature superconductivity, metal-insulator phase transition. In this thesis, we present a variety of new developments in the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) methods, including the incorporation of symmetry in both the trial wave function and the projector, developing the constraint release method, using the force-bias to drastically improve the efficiency in Metropolis framework, identifying and solving the infinite variance problem, and sampling Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov wave function. With these developments, some of the most challenging many-electron problems are now under control. We obtain an exact numerical solution of two-dimensional strongly interacting Fermi atomic gas, determine the ground state properties of the 2D Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, provide benchmark results for the ground state of the two-dimensional Hubbard model, and establish that the Hubbard model has a stripe order in the underdoped region.
Strongly correlated systems, i.e., quantum materials for which the interactions between its constituents are strong, are good candidates for the development of applications based on quantum-mechanical principles, such as quantum computers. Two paradigmatic models of strongly correlated systems are heavy-fermionic systems and one-dimensional spin-12 systems, with and without quenched disorder. In the past decade, improvement in computational methods and a vast enhancement in computational power has made it possible to study these systems in a a non-perturbative manner. In this thesis we present state-of-the-art numerical methods to investigate the properties of strongly correlated systems, and we apply these methods to solve a couple of selected problems in quantum condensed matter theory. We start by revisiting the phase diagram of the Falicov-Kimball model on the square lattice which can be considered as a heavy-fermionic systems. This model describes an interplay between conduction electrons and heavy electrons and reveals several distinct metal-insulator phase transitions. Using a lattice Monte-Carlo method, we study the transport properties of the model. Our analysis describes the role of temperature and interaction strength on the metal-insulator phase transitions in the Falicov-Kimball model. The second part of the thesis investigate the spatial structure of the entanglement in ground and thermal statesof the transverse-field Ising chain. We use the logarithmic negativity as a measure for the entanglement between two disjoint blocks. We investigate how logarithmic negativity depends on the spatial separation between two blocks, which can be viewed as the entanglement analog of a spatial correlation function. We find sharp entanglement thresholds at a critical distance beyond which the logarithmic negativity vanishes exactly and thus the two blocks become unentangled. Our results hold even in the presence of long-ranged quantum correlations, i.e., at the system’s quantum critical point. Using Time-Evolving Block Decimation (TEBD), we explore this feature as a function of temperature and size of the two blocks. We present a simple model to describe our numerical observations. In the last part of this thesis, we introduce an order parameter for a many-body localized spin-glass (MBL-SG) phase. We show that many-body localized spin-glass order can also be detected from two-site reduced density matrices, which we use to construct an eigenstate spin-glass order parameter. We find that this eigenstate spin-glass order parameter captures spin-glass phases in random Ising chains, both in many-body eigenstates as well as in the nonequilibrium dynamics, from a local in time measurement. We discuss how our results can be used to observe MBL-SG order within current experiments in Rydberg atoms and trapped ion systems.
The investigation of nonequilibrium thermodynamics in quantum many-body systems underscores the importance of quantum work, which differs from its classical counterpart due to its statistical nature. Recent studies have shown that quantum work can serve as an effective indicator of quantum phase transitions in systems subjected to sudden quenches. However, the potential of quantum work to identify thermal phase transitions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we examine several types of thermal phase transitions in a sudden-quench hard-core boson model, including Ising, three-state Potts, and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions. Through finite-size scaling analysis, we conclude that work statistics can also characterize the critical behaviors of thermal phase transitions in generic many-body systems. This study lays the groundwork for broader applications of work statistics in analyzing critical phenomena across diverse settings.