This work deals with the calculation of magnetic properties for strongly correlated electron systems. One of most important model in this field of physics is the Hubbard model. It describes the situation of, for example, transition metal oxides. This particular class of materials is known for magnetic order at low temperatures. The reason for this and at the same time the difficulty for theoretically describing them are strong electron-electron-interactions. For calculating the magnetic properties I used the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), which relates the lattice model to an impurity model. Even this simplified model is highly non trivial. For solving it I used two different renormalization group approaches. I used the numerical renormalization group (NRG) and the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and also compared both methods with each other. These modern non-perturbative techniques are able to solve the impurity model, which then can be used for calculating the magnetic phases of the lattice models. In this work I mainly focused on the frustrated one-orbital Hubbard model and the two-orbital Hubbard model. Frustration represents a situation where the aimed magnetic solution cannot be stabilized for the used lattice. Frustration can, for example, be generated by long range hopping of the electrons. This can lead to a situation where new magnetic phases are stable. For systematically analyzing the effects of frustration, I performed calculations for a Bethe lattice with nearest and next nearest neighbor hopping, for which I varied the strength of the interaction and the next nearest neighbor hopping. Another very important aspect for describing transition metal oxides are orbital degrees of freedom. For analyzing the influence of these degrees of freedom I used the two-orbital Hubbard model, which shows new effects.
This work deals with the calculation of magnetic properties for strongly correlated electron systems. One of most important model in this field of physics is the Hubbard model. It describes the situation of, for example, transition metal oxides. This particular class of materials is known for magnetic order at low temperatures. The reason for this and at the same time the difficulty for theoretically describing them are strong electron-electron-interactions. For calculating the magnetic properties I used the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), which relates the lattice model to an impurity model. Even this simplified model is highly non trivial. For solving it I used two different renormalization group approaches. I used the numerical renormalization group (NRG) and the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) and also compared both methods with each other. These modern non-perturbative techniques are able to solve the impurity model, which then can be used for calculating the magnetic phases of the lattice models. In this work I mainly focused on the frustrated one-orbital Hubbard model and the two-orbital Hubbard model. Frustration represents a situation where the aimed magnetic solution cannot be stabilized for the used lattice. Frustration can, for example, be generated by long range hopping of the electrons. This can lead to a situation where new magnetic phases are stable. For systematically analyzing the effects of frustration, I performed calculations for a Bethe lattice with nearest and next nearest neighbor hopping, for which I varied the strength of the interaction and the next nearest neighbor hopping. Another very important aspect for describing transition metal oxides are orbital degrees of freedom. For analyzing the influence of these degrees of freedom I used the two-orbital Hubbard model, which shows new effects.
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.
Two aspects of strongly correlated electron systems are studied in this thesis. Hubbard-type models are thought to be at the basis of high-critical-temperature superconductivity. One interaction which has not had much study is the nearest-neighbour hopping of on-site singlet pairs. We refine earlier renormalization group arguments and, using the density-matrix renormalization group method, numerically confirm their prediction that a spin gap opens at infinitesimal pair-hopping amplitude V > 0 in the one-dimensional tight-binding model. We also find a phase separation transition at a finite V > 0 as well as a spin-gap transition at a finite V < 0. The exotic magnetic behaviour of heavy-fermion materials involves an interplay between the screening of local moments from each other and the formation of a magnetic state of long range order. While the single-impurity Kondo Hamiltonian is thought to model some aspects of this behaviour, the properties of the Kondo lattice model away from half-filling are largely unknown. We determine the presence of a spin-gap region in the phase diagram of the one-dimensional Heisenberg-Kondo lattice model and make predictions about certain concealed dimerization order parameters.
In this thesis, several aspects of correlation effects in band insulators that were hitherto not addressed, both in equilibrium and non-equilibrium, are studied using the Ionic Hubbard model (IHM) at half-filling and Dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). The IHM is an extension of the Hubbard model on a bipartite lattice with a staggered on-site “ionic potential Δ added in. The Hubbard model by itself is a tight-binding model of electrons hopping between (orbitals localized on) lattice sites, with amplitudes t and t’ for first neighbor and second neighbor hopping respectively, together with a coulomb repulsion energy cost of U for double occupancy (i.e., with both up and down spin electrons) at any lattice site. The studies in this thesis address strong correlation effects in this model using DMFT techniques which map the lattice problem to a self consistently embedded quantum impurity problem. The impurity problem itself is solved using state of the art continuous time quantum monte-carlo (CTQMC) techniques (Ch.s 3 and 4) as well as the somewhat simpler Iterated Perturbation Theory (IPT) (Ch.s 3, 5 and 6).
Chapter 3 of the thesis is devoted to a detailed analysis of the properties of the half-filled t-U-Δ IHM (i.e., with t’=0) on a Bethe lattice of infinite connectivity. It is shown conclusively here that for a finite Δ and at zero temperature (T=0), the IHM has a first order transition from the Band Insulator (BI) phase to an antiferromagnetic insulating (AFI) phase at a threshold U = UAF (which increases with Δ) such that the BI to AFI transition preempts the transition from the BI to the correlation induced paramagnetic metallic (PM) phase. Evidence is also presented for a quantum transition to a sliver of half-metal (HM) phase just after the AF order turns on, followed by a return to the AFI phase on further increasing U. With increasing T, the AF order is lost via a first-order transition for weak to intermediate U/t. In the strongly correlated regime, where the effective low-energy Hamiltonian is the Heisenberg model, the transition from the AFI to the paramagnetic Mott insulating phase (adiabatically connected to the BI phase) is of second order. As T increases, the range of U over which the AF order is stable shrinks, collapsing eventually to a line of tricritical points that separates the surfaces of first- and second-order phase transitions in the T-U-Δ space.
In Chapter 4 of the thesis the t-t’-U-Δ IHM on a square lattice is studied using DMFT+CTQMC. It is shown here that the presence of t’ frustrates the AF order for weak to intermediate correlations, resulting in the stabilization of the correlation induced PM phase over a broad region of the parameter space, although the AFI is always the stable phase for large enough U. In the intermediate coupling regimes, two other interesting phases show up as a result of the competition among U, Δ and t’ : a Ferrimagnetic metallic (FM) phase which has non-zero values of the uniform as well as staggered magnetization; and even more interesting, an…
In recent years the numerical renormalization group (NRG) method has been extended to the calculation of dynamic response functions and transport properties of magnetic impurity models. The approach can now be applied more widely to lattice models of strongly correlated electron systems by the use of dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), in which the lattice problem is transformed into one for an effective impurity with an additional self-consistency constraint. We review these developments and assess the potential for further applications of this approach. We also discuss an alternative approach to renormalization, renormalized perturbation theory, in which the leading asymptotically exact results for the low temperature regime for a number of magnetic impurity models can be obtained within finite order perturbation theory.
For a long time strong electronic correlations in metals have mainly been associated with Mottness, the proximity to a Mott metal-insulator transition (MIT), where large Coulomb interactions induce the localization of charges. However, triggered by the discovery of the iron-based superconductors about ten years ago, it was realized that multi-orbital materials with only moderate Coulomb but sizeable Hund’s rule interactions – so-called Hund metals – allow for a distinct screening mechanism towards strong correlations: Hundness. Here, Hund’s rule constrains the spin rather than the charge dynamics. This discovery led to a vividly debated fundamental issue in the field of strongly correlated condensed matter systems, which is the main topic of the present thesis: what is the origin of strong correlations in the normal phase of Hund metals, Mottness or Hundness? And what are their decisive fingerprints? The goal of this dissertation is twofold. First, we present and advance our method: the numerical renormalization group (NRG) as viable real-frequency multi-band impurity solver for dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), a common approach to tackle strongly correlated systems. Second, we apply DMFT+NRG to shed light on the Hund-metal problem raised above. In the first part of this thesis we present our state-of-the-art NRG solver, which offers direct access to data with unprecedented real-frequency spectral resolution at arbitrarily low energies and temperatures in contrast to commonly used Quantum Monte Carlo solvers. It is based on matrix product states and exploits non-abelian symmetries to reduce numerical costs. In the case of orbital symmetry, this allows us to treat multi-band models with more than two bands, and thus to tackle the Hund-metal problem for the first time with NRG. For multi-band models without orbital symmetry, an “interleaved” scheme of NRG (iNRG) was recently developed, dramatically increasing the numerical efficiency. Remarkably, the accuracy of iNRG is comparable to standard NRG, as we reveal in a detailed study. This finding establishes iNRG as a promising DMFT solver for material-specific model simulations. In the second part of this thesis we study a minimal toy model for Hund metals with DMFT+NRG, the orbital-symmetric three-band Hubbard-Hund model (3HHM) close to a lattice filling of 1/3. Our major insight is “spin-orbital separation” (SOS), a Hund’s-ruleinduced two-stage Kondo-type screening process, in which orbital screening occurs at much higher energies than spin screening. In Hund metals, i.e. far from a MIT phase boundary, SOS thus causes large electron masses by strongly reducing the coherence scale below which a Fermi liquid is formed. Further, it opens up a broad incoherent and strongly particle-hole asymmetric intermediate energy regime that reaches up to bare excitation scales. This SOS regime shows fractional power-law behavior and is characterized by resilient “Hund quasiparticles” with itinerant orbital degrees of freedom coupled non-trivially to quasi-free large spins. At zero temperature, the local density of states exhibits a two-tier quasiparticle peak on top of a broad incoherent background. In contrast, in Mott-correlated metals, i.e. close to the MIT phase boundary, the SOS regime becomes negligibly small and the Hubbard bands are well separated. These findings lead to distinct signatures of Hundness and Mottness in the temperature dependence of ARPES spectra, static local susceptibilities, resistivity, thermopower and entropy, many of which were also found in realistic simulations of the archetypal Hund- and Mott-correlated materials, Sr2RuO4 and V2O3. In summary, we provide evidence that and elucidate how Hundness evokes strong correlation effects in Hund metals. This might help to better interpret experimental results and guide superconducting theories.
The half-filled Hubbard model on the Bethe lattice with coordination number z=3 is studied using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method. Ground-state properties such as the energy E, average local magnetization $ $, its fluctuations $ - ^2$ and various spin correlation functions $ - $ are determined as a function of the Coulomb interaction strength U/t. The calculated local magnetic moments $ $ increase monotonically with increasing Coulomb repulsion U/t forming an antiferromagnetic spin-density-wave state which matches the two sublattices of the bipartite Bethe lattice. At large U/t, $ $ is strongly reduced with respect to the saturation value 1/2 due to exchange fluctuations between nearest neighbors (NN) spins (∣∣≃0.35 for U/t→+∞). $ - ^2$ shows a maximum for U/t=2.4--2.9 which results from the interplay between the usual increase of $ $ with increasing U/t and the formation of important permanent moments $ $ at large U/t. NN sites show antiferromagnetic spin correlations which increase with increasing Coulomb repulsion. In contrast next NN sites are very weakly correlated over the whole range of U/t. The accuracy of the DMRG results is discussed by comparison with tight-binding exact results, independent DMRG calculations for the Heisenberg model and simple first-order perturbation estimates.