The previous chapter is devoted to the formulation of DMFT and applications that are exact in the limit of infinite dimensions; however, in finite dimensions this is only a single-site approximation. The present chapter is devoted to clusters and other methods to treat correlation between sites. The equations are derived in a unified way, applicable to a single site or a cluster. For a cluster with more than one site there are various ways to choose the boundary conditions and the embedding procedure, and special care must be taken to satisfy causality and translation invariance. A few selected applications illustrate different techniques and results for Hubbard-type models. The essential features of DMFT are brought out in the previous chapter in the simplest form: the single-site approximation in which correlation between sites can be neglected. In this case the self-energy due to interactions can be calculated using an auxiliary system of a single site embedded in an effective medium that represents the surrounding crystal. The resulting many-body problem is equivalent to an Anderson impurity model that must be solved self-consistently. The results are exact for infinite dimensions d → ∞; however, in any finite dimension, i.e., real systems, this is just a mean-field approximation analogous to the Weiss mean field in magnetic systems or the CPA for disordered alloys. There are, however, many important properties and phenomena that require us to go beyond mean-field approximations. For example, basic questions concerning the nature of a metal–insulator transition can be established only by quantitative assessment of the correlations between different sites. Is a single site sufficient (the central idea in the arguments by Mott discussed in Sec. 3.2) or is correlation between sites (for example, an ordered antiferromagnetic state) essential for interactions to lead to an insulating state? A complete theory must establish the range of correlation needed to understand the mechanisms and to make quantitative calculations. A striking example that requires a k -dependent self-energy is the opening of a “pseudogap” in only part of the Brillouin zone in a high-temperature superconductor, as illustrated in Fig. 2.16. This chapter is devoted to methods that go beyond the single-site approximation to take into account interactions and correlations between electrons on sites.
The previous chapter is devoted to the formulation of DMFT and applications that are exact in the limit of infinite dimensions; however, in finite dimensions this is only a single-site approximation. The present chapter is devoted to clusters and other methods to treat correlation between sites. The equations are derived in a unified way, applicable to a single site or a cluster. For a cluster with more than one site there are various ways to choose the boundary conditions and the embedding procedure, and special care must be taken to satisfy causality and translation invariance. A few selected applications illustrate different techniques and results for Hubbard-type models. The essential features of DMFT are brought out in the previous chapter in the simplest form: the single-site approximation in which correlation between sites can be neglected. In this case the self-energy due to interactions can be calculated using an auxiliary system of a single site embedded in an effective medium that represents the surrounding crystal. The resulting many-body problem is equivalent to an Anderson impurity model that must be solved self-consistently. The results are exact for infinite dimensions d → ∞; however, in any finite dimension, i.e., real systems, this is just a mean-field approximation analogous to the Weiss mean field in magnetic systems or the CPA for disordered alloys. There are, however, many important properties and phenomena that require us to go beyond mean-field approximations. For example, basic questions concerning the nature of a metal–insulator transition can be established only by quantitative assessment of the correlations between different sites. Is a single site sufficient (the central idea in the arguments by Mott discussed in Sec. 3.2) or is correlation between sites (for example, an ordered antiferromagnetic state) essential for interactions to lead to an insulating state? A complete theory must establish the range of correlation needed to understand the mechanisms and to make quantitative calculations. A striking example that requires a k -dependent self-energy is the opening of a “pseudogap” in only part of the Brillouin zone in a high-temperature superconductor, as illustrated in Fig. 2.16. This chapter is devoted to methods that go beyond the single-site approximation to take into account interactions and correlations between electrons on sites.
In the previous chapters DMFT has been developed as a methodology for calculation of dynamical and thermodynamic properties of many-body systems, with applications to model systems. In order for DMFT to be a general method for quantitative calculations, there must be systematic procedures to derive all the ingredients from first principles. In this chapter we consider the most prominent examples, materials with partially filled 3 d , 4 f , or 5 f localized, atomic-like states, and set up the characteristic form of the hamiltonian. This is the basis for DFT+DMFT methods discussed here and used in the examples in Ch. 20, and for the combination of DMFT with many-body perturbation theory in Ch. 21. Simpler techniques, including self-interaction correction, DFT+U, and DFT+Gutzwiller, are also useful and are summarized in the last sections of this chapter. Up to this point, dynamical mean-field theory has been developed for model systems with Hubbard-type hamiltonians, where the hopping matrix elements and interactions are considered as parameters. For problems with strong interactions, DMFT leads to renormalized bands, satellites in the one-particle spectra, magnetic phase transitions and local moments, metal–insulator transitions, and many other phenomena observed in real materials, as brought out in Ch. 2. The purpose of this chapter is to provide the framework for a quantitative theory of these materials. These are difficult problems, experimentally, theoretically, and computationally, and the first step is to identify the aspects of the materials that must be treated explicitly as the local strongly interacting system, and the “rest” that are treated by a different method. This division of the problem is useful because a real material involves many degrees of freedom, i.e., the electronic states must be described in a basis sufficiently large to describe all the relevant states. However, the part that can be treated by non-perturbative solvers (Ch. 18) is limited by the computational cost that scales rapidly with the number of states included in the embedded site or cluster. Thus one must choose a small number of localized orbitals that inevitably are non-unique. This may seem like a step backward for quantitative methods; however, it opens a window for methods to treat these interesting problems and it presents a challenge to overcome the limitations.
Think globally, act locally. Summary Dynamical mean-field theory is designed to treat systems with local effective interactions that are strong compared with the independent-particle terms that lead to delocalized band-like states. Interactions are taken into account by a many-body calculation for an auxiliary system, a site embedded in a dynamical mean field, that is chosen to best represent the coupling to the rest of the crystal. The methods are constructed to be exact in three limits: interacting electrons on isolated sites, a lattice with no interactions, and the limit of infinite dimensions d → ∞ where mean-field theory is exact. This chapter is devoted to the general formulation, the single-site approximation where the calculation of the self-energy is mapped onto a self-consistent quantum impurity problem, and instructive examples for the Hubbard model on a d → ∞ Bethe lattice. Further developments and applications are the topics of Chs. 17–21. One of the most rewarding features of condensed matter theory is the ability to address difficult problems from different points of view. The preceding Chs. 9–15 present an approach based on perturbation expansions in the Coulomb interaction. In particular, the GW approximation for the self-energy has proven to be extremely successful in describing electronic spectra of many materials, as described in Ch. 13. The methods can be applied to the ordered states of materials with d and f states, for example, ferromagnetic Ni and anti-ferromagnetic NiO, as described in Secs. 13.4 and 20.7. However, the GW and related approximations have difficulties in treating cases with degenerate or nearly degenerate states and low-energy excitations. Present-day methods do not describe phenomena like the fluctuations of local moments in a ferromagnetic material above the Curie temperature or the insulating character of NiO in the paramagnetic phase; more generally, they have difficulty describing strong correlation. The topic of this chapter and Chs. 17–21 is dynamical mean-field theory, which is also a Green's function method in which the key quantity is the self-energy. However, it is designed to treat strong interactions for electrons in localized atomic-like states, such as the d and f states in transition metals, lanthanide and actinide elements and compounds.
Almost 50 years after the invention of the Hubbard model [1–3] and despite modern petaflop supercomputers, a precise analysis of the criticality of this most basic model for electronic correlations has not been achieved so far, at least not in three dimensions. Dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) [4–6] was a big step forward to quantitatively calculate the three dimensional Hubbard model since the major contribution of electronic correlations, i.e., the local ones, are well captured within this theory. Local correlations give rise to quasiparticle renormalization, the Mott-Hubbard transition, magnetism, and even more subtle issues such as kinks in a purely electronic models [7]. However, non-local spatial correlations are also naturally generated by a purely local Hubbard interaction, and, as it is well known, they become of essential importance in the vicinity of secondorder phase transitions. As these correlations are neglected in DMFT, this scheme can provide only for a conventional mean-field (MF) description of the critical properties. To overcome this shortcoming cluster extensions to DMFT such as the dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) and cluster-DMFT have been proposed, see Ref. 8 for a review. In these approaches non-local correlations beyond DMFT are taken into account, however only within the range of the cluster size; and due to computational limitations the actual size of the cluster is severely restricted to about 3-5 sites for each direction. Hence, short-range correlations are included by these approaches, whereas long-range ones are not. Nonetheless, Kent et al. [9] were able to extrapolate the cluster size of so-called Betts clusters to infinity, albeit assuming from the very beginning the critical exponents to be those of the Heisenberg model. This way they extrapolated the critical temperature of the paramagnetic-toantiferromagnetic phase transition which was found to be in agreement with earlier quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations of Staudt et al. [10] on finite lattices.
Pseudogap physics in strongly correlated systems is essentially scale dependent. We generalize the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) by including into the DMFT equations dependence on correlation length of pseudogap fluctuations via additional (momentum dependent) self-energy Sigma_k. This self-energy describes non-local dynamical correlations induced by short-ranged collective SDW-like antiferromagnetic spin (or CDW-like charge) fluctuations. At high enough temperatures these fluctuations can be viewed as a quenched Gaussian random field with finite correlation length. This generalized DMFT+Sigma_k approach is used for the numerical solution of the weakly doped one-band Hubbard model with repulsive Coulomb interaction on a square lattice with nearest and next nearest neighbour hopping. The effective single impurity problem is solved by numerical renormalization group (NRG). Both types of strongly correlated metals, namely (i) doped Mott insulator and (ii) the case of bandwidth W
This chapter, like the previous one, describes quantum Monte Carlo methods for the simulation of a system of interacting electrons at nonzero temperature. Here, we target a particular class of problems, characterized by a small number of correlated sites or orbitals, that we call impurity problems. While we could apply the methods of the previous chapter to such impurity models, the algorithms discussed here are more advantageous not only because they work in continuous imaginary time and hence lack the Trotter approximation error inherent to the previous methods, but also because they manipulate determinants of matrices of smaller size, which can be handled more efficiently. At the same time, the continuous-time approach is applicable to broader classes of impurity problems. Driving the development of these continuous-time impurity solvers was the desire to perform more efficient simulations of correlated lattice models within the framework of dynamical mean-field theory. This formalism maps the lattice problem onto an impurity problem, whose parameters are determined by a self-consistency condition. In some cases, the self-consistent solution gives a good approximation of the properties of the original lattice problem. When we combine this dynamical mean-field approximation with the local-density approximation for electronic structure calculations, we obtain a powerful scheme for electronic structure calculations of strongly correlated materials. In this chapter we discuss the most important classes of impurity models, sketch the basics of the dynamical mean-field approximation, and detail the different variants of continuous-time impurity solvers. Quantum impurity models A quantum impurity model describes an atom or molecule embedded in some host with which it exchanges electrons, spin, and energy. This exchange allows the impurity to make transitions between different quantum states, and in the presence of interactions within or between the impurity orbitals, these transitions lead to nontrivial dynamical properties. Quantum impurity models play a prominent role, for example, in the theoretical description of the magnetic and electric properties of dilute metal alloys and in theoretical studies of quantum dots and molecular conductors. These models also appear as an auxiliary problem whose solution yields the dynamical mean-field description of correlated lattice models.
The concept of electronic correlations plays an important role in modern condensed matter physics. It refers to interaction effects which cannot be explained within a static mean‐field picture as provided by Hartree‐Fock theory. Electronic correlations can have a very strong influence on the properties of materials. For example, they may turn a metal into an insulator (Mott‐Hubbard metal‐insulator transition). In these lecture notes I (i) introduce basic notions of the physics of correlated electronic systems, (ii) discuss the construction of mean‐field theories by taking the limit of high lattice dimensions, (iii) explain the simplifications of the many‐body perturbation theory in this limit which provide the basis for the formulation of a comprehensive mean‐field theory for correlated fermions, the dynamical mean‐field theory (DMFT), (v) derive the DMFT self‐consistency equations, and (vi) apply the DMFT to investigate electronic correlations in models and materials.