Using the non-perturbative numerical renormalisation group (NRG) we analyse purely fermionic as well as more complex Bose-Fermi quantum impurity systems on their equilibrium properties and beyond: We present an extensive exploration of real-time dynamics for various quenches using the time-dependent NRG. For the purely fermionic system, we use the Single-impurity Anderson model (SIAM) in which the impurity is a localised orbital hybridising with a surrounding conduction band. The model enables charge scattering with a pseudo-gap scattering rate and features a quantum critical point separating the local moment (LM) phase with an unscreened spin moment from a symmetric strong coupling (SSC) phase with a fractionally screened spin moment. The real-time dynamics of the local double occupancy nicely thermalises for quenches regarding the SSC phase. Whereas for quenches within or into the LM phase the double occupancy systematically deviates from thermal equilibrium for long times. A comparison with results of a recently published time-dependent Gutwiller approach reveals clear discrepancies since this approach restricts the formation of the local moment only on the impurity site. We extend the system by an additional bosonic bath leading to the Bose-Fermi Anderson model (BFAM) and study the influence of the additional bosonic degrees of freedom on the real-time dynamics. In equilibrium the bosonic bath features an additional quantum critical point leading to a localised phase once the coupling to a sub-ohmic bosonic bath exceeds a critical value. In general the coupled bosonic bath leads to a renormalisation of the Coulomb interaction. We show that the dynamics is influenced by the specific choice of the bath exponents. For a F-type combination the non-equilibrium dynamics can be completely reproduced by an effective purely fermionic SIAM while for a B-type combination the nature of the bosonic bath and the coupling strength has a profound impact on the electron dynamics which can only be partially understood by an effective SIAM. Furthermore, we investigate the spin dynamics of an initially polarised impurity spin which is coupled to a fermionic and a bosonic bath leading to the Bose-Fermi Kondo model (BFKM). Through the coupling to the fermionic bath the polarisation vanishes with time. We show that in analogy to the spin-boson model (SBM) an initially coupling to the bosonic bath affects the real-time dynamics fundamentally leading to a remaining polarisation for long times.
Using the non-perturbative numerical renormalisation group (NRG) we analyse purely fermionic as well as more complex Bose-Fermi quantum impurity systems on their equilibrium properties and beyond: We present an extensive exploration of real-time dynamics for various quenches using the time-dependent NRG. For the purely fermionic system, we use the Single-impurity Anderson model (SIAM) in which the impurity is a localised orbital hybridising with a surrounding conduction band. The model enables charge scattering with a pseudo-gap scattering rate and features a quantum critical point separating the local moment (LM) phase with an unscreened spin moment from a symmetric strong coupling (SSC) phase with a fractionally screened spin moment. The real-time dynamics of the local double occupancy nicely thermalises for quenches regarding the SSC phase. Whereas for quenches within or into the LM phase the double occupancy systematically deviates from thermal equilibrium for long times. A comparison with results of a recently published time-dependent Gutwiller approach reveals clear discrepancies since this approach restricts the formation of the local moment only on the impurity site. We extend the system by an additional bosonic bath leading to the Bose-Fermi Anderson model (BFAM) and study the influence of the additional bosonic degrees of freedom on the real-time dynamics. In equilibrium the bosonic bath features an additional quantum critical point leading to a localised phase once the coupling to a sub-ohmic bosonic bath exceeds a critical value. In general the coupled bosonic bath leads to a renormalisation of the Coulomb interaction. We show that the dynamics is influenced by the specific choice of the bath exponents. For a F-type combination the non-equilibrium dynamics can be completely reproduced by an effective purely fermionic SIAM while for a B-type combination the nature of the bosonic bath and the coupling strength has a profound impact on the electron dynamics which can only be partially understood by an effective SIAM. Furthermore, we investigate the spin dynamics of an initially polarised impurity spin which is coupled to a fermionic and a bosonic bath leading to the Bose-Fermi Kondo model (BFKM). Through the coupling to the fermionic bath the polarisation vanishes with time. We show that in analogy to the spin-boson model (SBM) an initially coupling to the bosonic bath affects the real-time dynamics fundamentally leading to a remaining polarisation for long times.
We investigate the influence of an additional bosonic bath onto the real-time dynamics of a localized orbital coupled to conduction band with an energy-dependent coupling function Γ(ε)∝∣ε∣r. Recently, a rich phase diagram has been found in this Bose-Fermi Anderson model, where the transitions between competing ground states are governed by quantum critical points. In addition to a transition between a Kondo singlet and a local moment, a localized phase has been established once the coupling to a sub-ohmic bosonic bath exceeds a critical value. Using the time-dependent numerical renormalization group approach, we show that the non-equilibrium dynamics with F-type of bath exponents can be fully understand within an effective single-impurity Anderson model using a renormalized local Coulomb interaction Uren. For regimes with B-type of bath exponents, the nature of the bosonic bath and the coupling strength has a profound impact on the electron dynamics which can only partially be understood using an appropriate Uren. The local expectation values always reach a steady state at very long times. By a scaling analysis for Λ→1+, we find thermalization of the system only in the strong coupling regime. In the local moment and in the localized phase significant deviations between the steady-state value and the thermal equilibrium value are found that are related to the distance to the quantum critical point.
The energy-dependent scattering of fermions from a localized orbital at an energy-dependent rate $\ensuremath{\Gamma}(\ensuremath{\varepsilon})\ensuremath{\propto}{|\ensuremath{\varepsilon}|}^{r}$ gives rise to quantum critical points (QCPs) in the pseudogap single-impurity Anderson model separating a local moment phase with an unscreened spin moment from a strong-coupling phase which slightly deviates from the screened phase of standard Kondo problem. Using the time-dependent numerical renormalization group (TD-NRG) approach we show that local dynamic properties always equilibrate towards a steady-state value even for quenches across the QCP but with systematic deviations from the thermal equilibrium depending on the distance to the critical coupling. Local nonequilibrium properties are presented for interaction quenches and hybridization quenches. We augment our numerical data by an analytical calculation that becomes exact at short times and find excellent agreement between the numerics and the analytical theory. For interaction quenches within the screened phase we find a universal function for the time-dependent local double occupancy. We trace back the discrepancy between our results and the data obtained by a time-dependent Gutzwiller variational approach to restrictions of the wave-function ansatz in the Gutzwiller theory: while the NRG ground states properly account for the formation of an extended spin moment which decouples from the system in the unscreened phase, the Gutzwiller ansatz only allows the formation of the spin moment on the local impurity orbital.
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.
We address the phenomenon of critical Kondo destruction in pseudogap Bose-Fermi Anderson and Kondo quantum impurity models. These models describe a localized level coupled both to a fermionic bath having a density of states that vanishes like ${|\ensuremath{\epsilon}|}^{r}$ at the Fermi energy ($\ensuremath{\epsilon}=0$) and, via one component of the impurity spin, to a bosonic bath having a sub-Ohmic spectral density proportional to ${|\ensuremath{\omega}|}^{s}$. Each bath is capable by itself of suppressing the Kondo effect at a continuous quantum phase transition. We study the interplay between these two mechanisms for Kondo destruction using continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo for the pseudogap Bose-Fermi Anderson model with 0<r<21 and $\frac{1}{2}\ensuremath{\le}s<1$, and applying the numerical renormalization group to the corresponding Kondo model. At particle-hole symmetry, the models exhibit a quantum-critical point between a Kondo (fermionic strong-coupling) phase and a localized (Kondo-destroyed) phase. The two solution methods, which are in good agreement in their domain of overlap, provide access to the many-body spectrum, as well as to correlation functions including, in particular, the single-particle Green's function and the static and dynamical local spin susceptibilities. The quantum-critical regime exhibits the hyperscaling of critical exponents and $\ensuremath{\omega}/T$ scaling in the dynamics that characterize an interacting critical point. The (r,s) plane can be divided into three regions: one each in which the calculated critical properties are dominated by the bosonic bath alone or by the fermionic bath alone, and between these two regions, a third in which the bosonic bath governs the critical spin response but both baths influence the renormalization-group flow near the quantum-critical point.
A detailed derivation of the recently proposed time-dependent numerical renormalization-group (TD-NRG) approach to nonequilibrium dynamics in quantum-impurity systems is presented. We demonstrate that the method is suitable for fermionic as well as bosonic baths. Comparisons with exact analytical results for the charge relaxation in the resonant-level model and for dephasing in the spin-boson model establish the accuracy of the method. The real-time dynamics of a single spin coupled to each type of bath is investigated. We use the TD-NRG to calculate the spin relaxation and spin precession of a single Kondo impurity. The short- and long-time dynamics are studied as a function of temperature in the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic regimes. The short-time dynamics agrees very well with analytical results obtained at second order in the exchange coupling J. In the ferromagnetic regime, the transient spin decay is described by the scaling variable $x=2{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{F}\ensuremath{\mid}J(T)\ensuremath{\mid}Tt$. In the antiferromagnetic regime, the long-time decay is governed for T<TK by the Kondo time scale 1∕TK. Here ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{F}$ is the conduction-electron density of states, TK is the Kondo temperature, and J(T) is the effective exchange coupling at temperature T. Results for spin precession are obtained by rotating the external magnetic field from the x axis to the z axis.
We investigate quantum impurity problems, where a local magnetic moment is coupled to the spin density of a bosonic environment, leading to bosonic versions of the standard Kondo and Anderson impurity models. In a physical situation, these bosonic environments can correspond either to deconfined spinons in certain classes of Z2 frustrated antiferromagnets, or to particles in a multicomponent Bose gase (in which case the spin degree of freedom is attributed to hyperfine levels). Using renormalization group techniques, we establish that our impurity models, which feature an exchange interaction analogous to Kondo impurities in Fermi liquids, allow flow toward a stable strong-coupling state. Since the low-energy bosons exist around a single point in momentum space, and there is no Fermi surface, an impurity quantum phase transition occurs at intermediate coupling, separating screened and unscreened phases. This behavior is qualitatively different from previously studied spin-isotropic variants of the spin-boson model, which display stable intermediate-coupling fixed points and no screening.