This brief review introduces the method and application of real-space renormalization group to strongly disordered quantum systems. The focus is on recent applications of the strong disorder renormalization group to the physics of disordered-boson systems and the superfluid–insulator transition in one dimension. The fact that there is also a well-understood weak disorder theory for this problem allows us to illustrate what aspects of the physics change at strong disorder. In particular, the strong disorder RG analysis suggests that the transitions at weak disorder and strong disorder belong to distinct universality classes, but this question remains under debate and is not fully resolved to date. Further applications of the strong disorder renormalization group to higher-dimensional Bose systems and to bosons coupled to dissipation are also briefly reviewed.
The problem of a quantum Ising degree of freedom coupled to a gapless bosonic mode appears naturally in many one-dimensional systems, yet surprisingly little is known how such a coupling affects the Ising quantum critical point. We investigate the fate of the critical point in a regime, where the weak coupling renormalization group (RG) indicates a flow toward strong coupling. Using a renormalization group analysis and numerical density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) calculations we show that, depending on the ratio of velocities of the gapless bosonic mode and the Ising critical fluctuations, the transition may remain continuous or become fluctuation-driven first order. The two regimes are separated by a tricritical point of a novel type.
This thesis is concerned with open quantum systems, and more specifically, quantum impurity models. By this we mean a small local quantum system in contact with a macroscopic non-interacting environment. This can be used to model individual impurities in metals and quantum information systems where the influence from the surrounding environment is not negligible. The numerical renormalization group (NRG) is the traditional method to study quantum impurity models. However its application is limited when dealing with real-time dynamics and bosonic systems. In recent years some of NRG's techniques have been introduced to the density matrix renormalization group method (DMRG), which itself is the most powerful numerical method to study one-dimensional quantum systems. The resulting method shows great potential, and this thesis explores and extends the power of the NRG+DMRG combination in treating open quantum systems. We focus mainly on two types of problem. The first is an open quantum system with a time-dependent Hamiltonian, which for example could be the theoretical description of various problems encountered in qubit manipulation. We combine NRG discretization and adaptive time-dependent DMRG (t-DMRG) to study the dissipative Landau-Zener problem. We also use this method to study the quantum decoherence process and the dynamical properties of the telegraph noise model. The results show that the NRG and t-DMRG combination is a fast, accurate and versatile method for such problems. The second type of problem we study involves the quantum critical properties of one- and two-bath spin-boson models. Unlike fermion and spin models, models with bosons are difficult to treat numerically as each boson basis has an infinite number of dimensions. By introducing the optimal boson basis into the variational matrix product state method (VMPS), which is a variant of DMRG, we can deal with an effective local boson basis as large as
1010. This is the crucial improvement over NRG which can only deal with at most a few dozen local basis states. With this powerful tool we have settled a controversy about the nature of the quantum phase transition in a sub-Ohmic spin-boson model regarding quantum to classical mapping. There, NRG fails to yield the right result due to the highly truncated local boson basis. We also explore the phase diagram of the two-bath spin-boson model and find a new critical phase. We demonstrate that NRG+VMPS with optimal boson basis represents a powerful setting to study quantum impurity models with a bosonic environment.