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arXiv:2610.32458

Hybrid Monte Carlo for the extended Kane-Mele-Hubbard model

Finn L. Temmen, Thomas Luu, Johann Ostmeyer, Lin Wang

Published Oct 23, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The Hubbard model offers a powerful minimal description of strongly correlated electrons in molecules and materials, yet it neglects effects observed in nature that give rise to a much richer variety of physics. For instance, including nonlocal interactions introduces a competition between strongly correlated phases, while incorporating spin-orbit coupling (SOC) can lead to the emergence of exotic topological phases. Seeking a more realistic platform for simulating graphene and, potentially, related materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), we therefore consider the extended Kane-Mele-Hubbard model, which features a Kane-Mele SOC term and nearest-neighbor interactions. Simulating this model is particularly challenging once the nonlocal interactions become dominant over the on-site Hubbard interaction, as a severe sign problem arises already at half filling, leaving this regime largely unexplored. In this work, we develop continuous auxiliary field formulations of the model, suitable for treatment with the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. Using these formulations, we characterize the sign problem across the model's parameter space and establish where simulations are feasible, as a first step toward the full phase diagram.

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The Hubbard model offers a powerful minimal description of strongly correlated electrons in molecules and materials, yet it neglects effects observed in nature that give rise to a much richer variety of physics. For instance, including nonlocal interactions introduces a competition between strongly correlated phases, while incorporating spin-orbit coupling (SOC) can lead to the emergence of exotic topological phases. Seeking a more realistic platform for simulating graphene and, potentially, related materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), we therefore consider the extended Kane-Mele-Hubbard model, which features a Kane-Mele SOC term and nearest-neighbor interactions. Simulating this model is particularly challenging once the nonlocal interactions become dominant over the on-site Hubbard interaction, as a severe sign problem arises already at half filling, leaving this regime largely unexplored. In this work, we develop continuous auxiliary field formulations of the model, suitable for treatment with the Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) algorithm. Using these formulations, we characterize the sign problem across the model's parameter space and establish where simulations are feasible, as a first step toward the full phase diagram.
Using first-principle Hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) simulations, we carry out an unbiased study of the competition between spin-density wave (SDW) and charge-density wave (CDW) order in the extended Hubbard model on the two-dimensional hexagonal lattice at half filling. We determine the phase diagram in the space of on-site and nearest-neighbor couplings UUU and VVV in the region $V
Understanding the properties of strongly correlated materials is a tough work since most of the times analytical tools cannot be applied due to the complicated nature of the problem. Here we apply quantum Monte Carlo techniques in order to tackle with one of the most important and unknown phenomena of many materials: the mechanism of superconductivity. We study the Hubbard-Holstein model which is one of the most simple theoretical models including strong correlation and electron-phonon coupling. By using twist-averaging boundary conditions we eliminate finite-size errors in the Monte Carlo simulations. With this useful tool we first solve the Hubbard-Holstein model by variational Monte Carlo by reporting the phase diagram of the model for different phonon frequencies at half filling. Then we investigate the phase separation away from half filling. Finally we try to attack the problem with an essentially unbiased method based on the auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo technique and accelerated Langevin dynamics. By curing the sign problem via Cauchy integration in the complex plane where the auxiliary fields have been defined, we report the effect of the electron-phonon coupling on some observables such as magnetization, spin and charge structure factors. We show preliminary results that are already meaningful to understand the nature of the transition between magnetism and charge order in the model at half filling.
We prove that the Kane-Mele-Hubbard model with purely imaginary next-nearest-neighbor hoppings has a particle-hole symmetry at half filling. Such a symmetry has interesting consequences including the absence of charge and spin currents along open edges, and the absence of the sign problem in the determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Consequentially, the interplay between band topology and strong correlations can be studied at high numeric precisions. The process that the topological band insulator evolves into the antiferromagnetic Mott insulator as interaction strength increases is studied by calculating both the bulk and edge electronic properties.
We investigate the magnetic and conduction properties of Kane-Mele Hubbard model in quasi one-dimensional honeycomb ribbon systems at half-filling by varying the strength of both spin-orbit interaction and on-site Coulomb correlation term. We use the numerical many-body configuration interaction (CI) method to investigate the dispersions of charge and spin gaps along with the momentum resolved spin-density profile over the full Brillouin zone. While the spin sector retains its topological nature at all values of spin-orbit coupling and Hubbard term, we report a new signature of the topological phase transition in the charge sector. This phase transition from a topological band insulating phase to a antiferromagnetically ordered Mott insulating phase is characterized by a shift of the many-body charge gap minima from Brillouin zone boundary to Dirac point. Our results provide a better understanding of the shifting of the gap-closing point in the momentum space which was reported in an earlier mean-field study of the same model and suggests an alternative numerical route to detect topological phase transition in strongly-correlated systems in terms of their momentum space behaviors.
The Hubbard model arises naturally when electron-electron interactions are added to the tight-binding descriptions of many condensed matter systems. For instance, the two-dimensional Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice is central to the ab initio description of the electronic structure of carbon nanomaterials, such as graphene. Such low-dimensional Hubbard models are advantageously studied with Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, such as hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC). HMC is the standard algorithm of the lattice gauge theory community, as it is well suited to theories of dynamical fermions. As HMC performs continuous, global updates of the lattice degrees of freedom, it provides superior scaling with system size relative to local updating methods. A potential drawback of HMC is its susceptibility to ergodicity problems due to so-called exceptional configurations, for which the fermion operator cannot be inverted. Recently, ergodicity problems were found in some formulations of HMC simulations of the Hubbard model. Here, we address this issue directly and clarify under what conditions ergodicity is maintained or violated in HMC simulations of the Hubbard model. We study different lattice formulations of the fermion operator and provide explicit, representative calculations for small systems, often comparing to exact results. We show that a fermion operator can be found which is both computationally convenient and free of ergodicity problems.
Strongly correlated fermionic systems are of great interest in condensed matter physics and numerical methods are indispensable tools for their study. However, existing approaches such as exact diagonalization (ED) and stochastic quantum Monte Carlo methods each suffer from fundamental limitations: ED is hindered by exponential scaling in system size, while Monte Carlo methods are plagued by sign problems and long autocorrelation times. These limitations restrict the accessible parameter space and developing algorithms that efficiently alleviate them remains a central challenge in computational physics. In this work, we propose a algorithm that combines ED and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) to simulate two-dimensional (2D) arrays of coupled quantum wires, modeled as interacting fermionic Hubbard chains. We demonstrate how our hybrid implementation of HMC, which we dub H 2 MC , outperforms either method alone across several key simulation facets. When compared to pure ED, H 2 MC has a much more favorable computational scaling, which allows us to push simulations to much larger 2D arrays. H 2 MC also greatly alleviates the sign problem and reduces autocorrelation times when compared to pure HMC formulations utilizing either real or imaginary auxiliary fields. Our formalism demonstrates how complementary strengths of seemingly disparate methods can be leveraged to enable feasible simulations in an extended parameter space.