In this thesis we use the recently developed dynamical mean-field approximation to study problems in strongly correlated electron systems, including high-Tc cuprate superconductors as well as a few quantum chemical reference systems. We start with an introduction to the background of the interacting electron systems, followed by a brief description on the current understanding of the physics of high-Tc cuprate superconductors. The approximate models that enter the theoretical framework will be discussed afterwards. Some quantum chemical methods for many-body quantum systems are included for review. Next we present the numerical methods employed in our study. The formalism of the dynamical mean-field approximation will be introduced including the single-site and cluster versions, followed by the Exact Diagonalization impurity solver for the solution of the quantum impurity model. Maximum Entropy analytic continuation method is also discussed, which is useful to obtain the physically relevant response functions. Then we apply dynamical mean-field approximation to high-Tc cuprate superconductors. The two-particle response functions, such as Raman scattering intensity and optical conductivity, are computed for the two dimensional Hubbard model. The calculations include the vertex corrections which are essential to obtain physically reasonable results in interacting electron systems. We also study the physics of the pseudogap in cuprates. The suppression of density of states near Fermi surface is present in our calculations, which is in qualitative agreement with the experimental data. Finally we discuss the application of dynamical mean-field theory to quantum chemistry. We extend the formalism of dynamical mean-field approximation to finite systems, and compare its performance in hydrogen clusters with different spatial configurations to other leading quantum chemical approaches. Dynamical mean-field theory involves mapping onto a quantum impurity model. We further examine the quantum impurity model representation of the transition metal dioxide molecules. The conceptual and technical difficulties will be discussed.
In this thesis we use the recently developed dynamical mean-field approximation to study problems in strongly correlated electron systems, including high-Tc cuprate superconductors as well as a few quantum chemical reference systems. We start with an introduction to the background of the interacting electron systems, followed by a brief description on the current understanding of the physics of high-Tc cuprate superconductors. The approximate models that enter the theoretical framework will be discussed afterwards. Some quantum chemical methods for many-body quantum systems are included for review. Next we present the numerical methods employed in our study. The formalism of the dynamical mean-field approximation will be introduced including the single-site and cluster versions, followed by the Exact Diagonalization impurity solver for the solution of the quantum impurity model. Maximum Entropy analytic continuation method is also discussed, which is useful to obtain the physically relevant response functions. Then we apply dynamical mean-field approximation to high-Tc cuprate superconductors. The two-particle response functions, such as Raman scattering intensity and optical conductivity, are computed for the two dimensional Hubbard model. The calculations include the vertex corrections which are essential to obtain physically reasonable results in interacting electron systems. We also study the physics of the pseudogap in cuprates. The suppression of density of states near Fermi surface is present in our calculations, which is in qualitative agreement with the experimental data. Finally we discuss the application of dynamical mean-field theory to quantum chemistry. We extend the formalism of dynamical mean-field approximation to finite systems, and compare its performance in hydrogen clusters with different spatial configurations to other leading quantum chemical approaches. Dynamical mean-field theory involves mapping onto a quantum impurity model. We further examine the quantum impurity model representation of the transition metal dioxide molecules. The conceptual and technical difficulties will be discussed.
In this thesis, we use the dynamical cluster approximation to study strongly correlated electron systems, especially from the angle of two-particle quantities, such as dynamical susceptibilities and vertex functions. The thesis starts with an introduction to the strongly correlated systems, including their definitions, prominent features, applications, difficulties in explaining them theoretically and some numerical approaches developed. The following section is an introduction to one family of strongly correlated systems we focus on in this thesis, the high temperature cuprates. The salient features in their general phase diagrams are described and discussed. Then an overview of the model we used to study high Tc cuprates is provided, with its limitations and extensions. To solve this model, the numerical method we employ for our study is the dynamical mean-field theory, the dynamical cluster approximation and the continuous time auxiliary field impurity solver. the last part of Chap.1 contains brief derivations for these algorithms. In Chap. 2, we apply dynamical cluster approximation to solve the one-band 2D Hub- bard model. The physical quantities of interest are two-particle quantitites, such as the dynamical susceptibility, irreducible vertex functions and full vertex functions. In this chapter, we describe how to obtain these susceptibilities via linear response theory and write down a detailed example for superconducting susceptibility. Finally we show how to calculate two particle quantities within DCA and obtain phase boundary with them. Chap. 3 is based on one of our publications. In this work, we specifically address the problem of optimizing the superconducting transition temperature in the 2D Hubbard model by analyzing wide regions of parameter space in density, interaction, and second- nearest-neighbor hopping strength.We mainly focus on d-wave superconductivity but show results of other symmetries in the last section. Chap. 4 follows another publication of ours. We study the temperature and doping evolution of NMR response in the normal state of the 2D Hubbard model using cluster dynamical mean-field theory. We simulate the Knight shift, the spin-echo decay rate and the spin-lattice relaxation time, and compare them to the cuprates experimental results. The last chapter extends the calculation of the NMR response to the superconducting state with the Nambu formalism. We show the detailed formulas and diagrams to calculate two-particle quantities, including the Dyson-Schwinger equation of motion.
Quantum mechanical lattice models, such as the famous Hubbard model, were originally intended as simplified descriptions of the behavior of electrons in real solids. Today it is clear that even such simple models can present remarkably rich physics. At the same time, obtaining reliable solutions for correlated quantum systems is difficult and requires the development of both computing resources and new algorithms and approximations. Parallel with the theoretical developments, applications of lattice models have also expanded to the study of ultracold atoms in optical lattices. The hallmark of these experiments is the possibility to design different kinds of lattices and to tune the interactions between the atoms, making it possible to do real experiments on theoretical "toy models". \n \nIn this thesis we have used dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) and its cluster extensions to study superfluidity and topological phenomena in lattice models. The DMFT combines the exact solution of a small reference system with a self-consistent mean-field treatment of the rest of the lattice. After a short introduction to the physical background of the lattice models, we review the formal definition and practical aspects of the DMFT method. We discuss the Baym-Kadanoff-Luttinger-Ward functional formalism that can be used to derive the DMFT equations, and review the numerical exact diagonalization and continuous-time quantum Monte-Carlo algorithms that were used in the implementation of the method. \n \nPublications I and VI discuss superfluid states induced by correlation effects that cannot easily be treated within a static mean-field theory. In Publication I we study a bilayer system where two different types of superfluids can be found depending on the densities of particles in the layers. Publication VI has a focus in the d-wave superconductivity and non-uniform, striped magnetism of the two-dimensional Hubbard model, which are thought to be connected with the high-Tc superconductivity in cuprate materials. The stripe state along with non-Fermi-liquid properties visible only in a beyond-mean-field treatment were observed also in the study of the Hubbard model on the Lieb lattice in Publication V. \n \nTopological and geometric properties of lattice systems, such as the Berry curvature and Chern numbers, play a central role in Publications II, III and IV. In Publication II we used exact diagonalization, DMFT and mean-field theory to study the topological phase diagram of an interacting Haldane model. The methods consistently predict a phase diagram with an interme-diate topological phase not found in the well-known non-interacting case. In Publications III and IV mean-field theory is used to study the connection between Berry curvature and the superfluid weight in lattice models, and DMFT calculations were used to support the mean-field results. Topological lattice systems have recently been realized in ultracold gas experiments and it is hoped that the calculations presented here inspire this line of research.
Understanding the impact of electronic correlations onto the properties of cuprate superconductors is one of the most prominent tasks of solid state physics. In particular, the intermingling of short range strong correlations, driving the Mott or charge-transfer insulator in the parent compound, and the long range antiferromagnetic scattering processes in the highly doped regime poses severe difficulties to the theoretical description. This thesis studies the impact of short and intermediate ranged strong correlations on the electronic properties of the 2D Hubbard model in the half-filled and doped cases by means of cellular dynamical mean-field theory (CDMFT), i.e. real-space clusters embedded in a dynamical mean-field. Specifically, the effect of incorporating gradually longer ranged correlations onto the metal-insulator transition is analysed and dynamic next-neighbour spin correlations are identified as the cause of the insulating state. Furthermore, by introducing the Bethe-Salpeter scheme for embedded clusters, spin, charge and pairing susceptibilities are computed, incorporating the short ranged strong correlations exactly via the effective interaction of CDMFT and at the same time treating long-ranged fluctuations in a perturbative manner. Firstly, this allows to study the charge response at the Mott transition, identifying the non-local extended s-wave character of the transition. Secondly, in the hole-doped case, the pseudogap, the Knight-shift, a d-wave superconducting instability and unilateral charge instabilities with a periodicity of 4 lattice sites in the s-wave and d-wave channel are observed, all of which strongly depend on next-neighbour spin singlet-like correlations contained in the effective interaction of CDMFT. This work paves the way for computing the conductivity at the boundary between the pseudogap regime and the Fermi liquid. This doctoral thesis was conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and the University of Stuttgart.
In this thesis, we tackle various problems in strongly correlated electron systems, which can be addressed properly via the non-perturbative dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) approach using the continuous time quantum Monte Carlo method as an impurity solver. First, we revisit the old Nagaoka ferromagnetism problem in the U=oo Hubbard model and study the stability of the ferromagnetic state as a function of the temperature, the doping level, and the next-nearest-neighbor hopping t'. We then address the nature of the Mott transition in the two-dimensional Hubbard model at half-filling using cluster DMFT. Cluster DMFT can incorporate the short-range correlations beyond DMFT by extending the spatial range in which correlations are treated exactly to a finite cluster size. The non-local correlations reduce substantially the critical interaction U and modify the shape of the transition lines in the phase diagram. We then concentrate on the calculation of two-particle response functions from the ab initio perspective by means of computing the one-particle excitation spectrum using the combination of the density functional theory (DFT) and DMFT and extracting the two-particle irreducible vertex function from a local two-particle Green's function computed within DMFT. In particular, we derive the equations for calculating the magnetic/charge susceptibility and the pairing susceptibility in superconductivity. This approach is applied to the Hubbard model and the periodic Anderson model and we determine the phase diagram of magnetism and superconductivity in these models. We show that the superconducting phase is indeed stable near the magnetic phase where the pairing interaction mediated by spin fluctuations is dominantly enhanced. The non-local correlation effect to superconductivity is also discussed using the dual fermion approach and the dynamical vertex approximation. We finally apply the vertex function approach within DFT+DMFT to a Fe-based superconductor, BaFe2As2, and compute the dynamical magnetic susceptibility in this material. Our calculation results show a good agreement with the magnetic excitation spectra observed in a neutron scattering experiment. The response function calculation method derived in this thesis can capture both a localized and an itinerant nature of collective excitations in strongly correlated electron systems.
This review is devoted to generalization of dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) for strongly correlated electronic systems towards the account of different types of additional interactions, necessary for correct physical description of many experimentally observed phenomena in such systems. As additional interactions we consider: (1) interaction of electrons with antiferromagnetic (or charge) fluctuations of order parameter in high-Tc superconductors leading to the formation of pseudogap state, (2) scattering of electrons on static disorder and its role in general picture of Anderson-Hubbard metal-insulator transition, (3) electron-phonon interaction and corresponding anomalies of electronic spectra in strongly correlated systems. Proposed DMFT+Sigma approach is based on taking into account above mentioned interactions by introducing additional self-energy Sigma (in general momentum dependent) into conventional DMFT scheme and calculated in a self-consistent way within the standard set of DMFT equations. Here we formulate general scheme of calculation of both one-particle (spectral functions and densities of states) and two-particle (optical conductivity) properties. We examine the problem of pseudogap formation, including the Fermi arc formation and partial destruction of the Fermi surface, metal-insulator transition in disordered Anderson-Hubbard model, and general picture of kink formation within electronic spectra in strongly correlated systems. DMFT+Sigma approach is generalized to describe realistic materials with strong electron-electron correlations based on LDA+DMFT method. General scheme of LDA+DMFT method is presented together with some of its applications to real systems. The LDA+DMFT+Sigma approach is employed to modelling of pseudogap state of electron and hole doped high-T_c cuprates. Comparison with variety of ARPES experiments is given.
Cluster dynamical mean-field and maximum entropy analytical continuation methods are used to obtain theoretical estimates for the many-body density of states, electron self-energy, in-plane and c-axis optical conductivity and the B1g and B2g Raman-scattering spectra of the two-dimensional square lattice Hubbard model at intermediate interaction strengths and carrier concentrations near half filling. The calculations are based on an eight-site cluster approximation which gives access to both the zone-diagonal and zone-face portions of the Fermi surface. At low dopings, the zone-face regions exhibit a ``pseudogap,'' a suppression of the many-body density of states for energies near the Fermi surface. The pseudogap magnitude is largest near half filling and decreases smoothly with doping but as temperature is increased, the gap fills in rather than closes. The calculated response functions bear a strong qualitative resemblance to data taken in the pseudogap regime of high-Tc cuprates, strongly suggesting that the intermediate coupling Hubbard model accounts for much of the exotic behavior observed in high-Tc materials.