Exact solutions of many-body problems hold a very special and significant place in condensed matter physics, helping us to understand the behaviors of interacting particles. In this thesis, we focus our attention on study the exact solutions of two interesting many-body problems in stronglycorrelated \n \nsystems. One is to calculate the exact correlation functions of \n \n1D chains of spinless fermions and hardcore bosons. The other is to calculate the single-particle dispersion relation of Hubbard model of spinless fermions on 2D square lattices.
Exact solutions of many-body problems hold a very special and significant place in condensed matter physics, helping us to understand the behaviors of interacting particles. In this thesis, we focus our attention on study the exact solutions of two interesting many-body problems in stronglycorrelated \n \nsystems. One is to calculate the exact correlation functions of \n \n1D chains of spinless fermions and hardcore bosons. The other is to calculate the single-particle dispersion relation of Hubbard model of spinless fermions on 2D square lattices.
The study of strongly correlated quantum many-body systems is an outstanding challenge. Highly accurate results are needed for the understanding of practical and fundamental problems in condensed-matter physics, high energy physics, material science, quantum chemistry and so on. Our familiar mean-field or perturbative methods tend to be ineffective. Numerical simulations provide a promising approach for studying such systems. The fundamental difficulty of numerical simulation is that the dimension of the Hilbert space needed to describe interacting systems increases exponentially with the system size. Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods are one of the best approaches to tackle the problem of enormous Hilbert space. They have been highly successful for boson systems and unfrustrated spin models. For systems with fermions, the exchange symmetry in general causes the infamous sign problem, making the statistical noise in the computed results grow exponentially with the system size. This hinders our understanding of interesting physics such as high-temperature superconductivity, metal-insulator phase transition. In this thesis, we present a variety of new developments in the auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) methods, including the incorporation of symmetry in both the trial wave function and the projector, developing the constraint release method, using the force-bias to drastically improve the efficiency in Metropolis framework, identifying and solving the infinite variance problem, and sampling Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov wave function. With these developments, some of the most challenging many-electron problems are now under control. We obtain an exact numerical solution of two-dimensional strongly interacting Fermi atomic gas, determine the ground state properties of the 2D Fermi gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, provide benchmark results for the ground state of the two-dimensional Hubbard model, and establish that the Hubbard model has a stripe order in the underdoped region.
One of the most intriguing areas of physics is the study of strongly correlated many-body systems. In these kinds of systems, a large number of particles interacts via interactions that are strong enough to play a major role in determining the properties of the system, which is particularly interesting when multiple interaction terms compete and cannot be satisfied simultaneously. Examples of phases they realize range from simple magnetism to puzzling phenomena such as superconductivity or topological order. Of special interest in condensed matter are fermionic models which have an extra layer of complexity added by the possibly intricate sign structure of the wave function. \nHowever, exactly solvable models that exhibit the sought-after phenomena are scarce and Hamiltonians that are supposed to model experiments often elude analytical solutions precisely due to the strong interactions. Numerical methods are thus essential to gain insight into these systems and provide an important link between theoretical models and real world experiments. There are many different methods that in principle allow solving a problem numerically exact, most prominently exact diagonalization, tensor network based methods such as DMRG and (quantum) Monte Carlo. Exact diagonalization is certainly the most straightforward technique which allows measuring any observable of interest but its application to interacting models is severely limited by the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with the system size which only allows studying rather small systems. Tensor network methods excel in the study of gapped, one-dimensional systems and while they have shown some impressive results for two-dimensional systems, they need a lot of fine tuning and careful analysis to be considered reliable in this very important domain. Quantum Monte Carlo, on the other hand, is in principle neither limited by the size of the Hilbert space nor by the strength of the interactions and has thus been a tremendously important tool for studying condensed matter systems which is why it is the focus of this thesis. \nIt is necessary to continuously advance existing and develop new techniques to keep up with theoretical as well as with experimental progress. In this thesis, new methods to identify and characterize conventional and novel phases of matter within quantum Monte Carlo are developed and tested on archetypical models of condensed matter. \nIn the first part of this thesis, a method to study entanglement properties of strongly interacting fermionic models in quantum Monte Carlo is presented. Measurements of this kind are needed because some characteristics of a system remain hidden from conventional approaches based on the calculation of correlation functions. Prime examples are systems that realize so-called topological order entailing long-range entanglement that can be positively diagnosed using entanglement techniques. Realizing such measurements in a concrete algorithm is not straightforward for fermions. A large section of this part is thus devoted to developing a solution to the problem of implementing entanglement measurements and benchmarking the results against known data. \nThe second part is concerned with a truly novel and recent approach to the many-body problem, namely the symbiosis of machine learning and quantum Monte Carlo techniques. Out of the many different possibilities to combine the two, this part is concerne with exploring ways in which machine learning can help to effortlessly explore phase diagrams of hitherto unknown Hamiltonians. \nDespite the power and versatility of quantum Monte Carlo techniques, it does suffer from one significant weakness called the fermion sign problem. At its core related to the peculiar exchange statistics of fermions, it is in principle merely a technical problem of the Monte Carlo procedure but one that actually prohibits the use of Monte Carlo methods for a large number of interesting problems. The sign problem has been known for a long time but remains unsolved to this day. Thus, it is time to approach the problem from a different perspective with the hope of learning something new that can either help to better understand the problem itself or the properties of the models affected by it. Both of the two major research areas, entanglement measures and machine learning, are capable of providing such new perspectives and the sign problem will be revisited in more detail in the context of each of them.
This Ph.D. thesis in mathematical physics concerns systems of interacting fermions with strong correlations. For these systems the physical properties can only be described in terms of the collective behavior of the fermions. Moreover, they are often characterized by a close competition between fermion localization versus delocalization, which can result in complex and exotic physical phenomena. Strongly correlated fermion systems are usually modelled by many-body Hamiltonians for which the kinetic- and interaction energy have the same order of magnitude. This makes them challenging to study as the application of conventional computational methods, like mean field- or perturbation theory, often gives unreliable results. Of particular interest are Hubbard-type models, which provide minimal descriptions of strongly correlated fermions. The research of this thesis focuses on such models defined on two-dimensional square lattices. One motivation for this is the so-called high-Tc problem of the cuprate superconductors. A main hypothesis is that there exists an underlying Fermi surface with nearly flat parts, i.e. regions where the surface is straight. It is shown that a particular continuum limit of the lattice system leads to an effective model amenable to computations. This limit is partial in that it only involves fermion degrees of freedom near the flat parts. The result is an effective quantum field theory that is analyzed using constructive bosonization methods. Various exactly solvable models of interacting fermions in two spatial dimensions are also derived and studied.
The time dependent many-body dynamics of strongly interacting particles on a two-dimensional lattice are studied with the recently developed checkerboard propagator. Application is made to the two-dimensional infinite U Hubbard model at high concentrations, for both fermion and boson systems. The concentration, initial state, and boundary condition dependence of vacancy correlation functions are analyzed, and related to the local densities of states. Quasidissipative behavior of the correlation functions is seen beyond a short initial time scale during which single-particlelike motion is seen.
Understanding quantum many-body systems with interactions is an important problem common to various fields of physics, such as atomic physics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and particle physics.Among others, ultracold atoms have provided ideal grounds to study strongly interacting systems and to explore exotic quantum states because of their high controllability.We can widely control the strengths of the interactions from weak to strong as well as the geometry of the systems.In order to deepen our understanding of quantum manybody systems with interactions, we in this thesis investigate two types of one-dimensional (1D) systems realizable with ultracold atoms; bosons and spinless fermions near two-body resonances and bosons near a three-body resonance.One-dimensional systems near two-body resonances have been intensively studied because, in the homogeneous cases, they are exactly solvable systems.The energy spectra and thermodynamic quantities exactly obtained by the Bethe ansatz have greatly contributed to deepening our comprehension of many-body systems in 1D.On the other hand, the exact computations of correlation functions, which encode information about excitations of the systems, are in general much more complicated even in the integrable systems.Motivated by this background, we derive a series of exact relations for correlation functions in bosons and fermions near two-body resonances.These relations called universal relations originate from the universal properties of the resonant systems: Their properties depend on the interactions only through the scattering lengths characterizing the low-energy scattering.The universal relations are strong constraints on the systems because the relations hold for any particle number, scattering length, temperature, and with or without a trapping potential.The relations include the asymptotic behaviors of correlation functions in high-energy regime as well as the energy relations, in which the energies are expressed in term of the momentum distributions.The universal relations involve two-and three-body contacts, which are the integrals of local pair and triad correlations, respectively.Firstly we derive, in both bosons and fermions, universal relations for static correlation functions such as static structure factors and momentum distributions within the first-quantized formalisms.The power laws of the static correlation functions for large momentum and the energy relations are obtained.The coefficients in these power-law behaviors are proportional to the two-body contact.We clarify that the three-body contact makes no contribution to the bosonic energy relation, but it plays a crucial role in the fermionic one.Secondly, we derive universal relations for dynamic correlation functions for bosons.Using the operator product expansion (OPE) in the field theoretical formalism, we obtain the largeenergy-momentum behaviors of the dynamic structure factor, the dynamic current correlation, and the single-particle spectral density as well as the quasiparticle energy and the scattering rate in high-energy regime.While the behaviors of the dynamic structure factor and the current correlation are proportional to the two-body contact, that of the single-particle spectral density is proportional to the number density.Because of the interrelation between 1D bosons and fermions near two-body resonances, the results of the dynamic structure factor and the current i
In this thesis, we study the physical properties of several ultracold few-boson systems depending on the interactions between their constituents. Nowadays, experimentally, it is possible to have great control with high precision over the geometry and the interactions between the particles, making them an excellent setup to test directly the principles of quantum mechanics. A very interesting point is to study the evolution of their properties with the number of particles. The theoretical study of these systems pretends to microscopically understand the current experimental results and give support to new experimental developments.\n\n\t\t\t\t The method that will be used is the exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian of the system. As we will see, in spite of the attempts to improve it, the method is limited by the fact that, in practice, it is only useful to study few-particle systems. The method has several advantages. First of all, one has access to both the ground and the excited states. In second place, the method is variational and converges to the exact solution as long as the Hilbert space in which we diagonalize is enlarged.\n\t\t\t\t Moreover, since we have access to the states of the system, it is possible to calculate any observable quantity of interest.\n\n\t\t\t\t First, we will study a system of spinless bosons trapped in a two-dimensional harmonic potential. The effect of the trap is to keep the system bound. It will be seen how the presence of a repulsive interaction changes the energy spectrum and other properties of the system. For instance, the density profile, which is usually measurable, and also the two-body distribution function, which is intimately related to the existence of correlations.\n\n\t\t\t\t Afterwards, the focus will be on the particular case of having only two bosons in the system interacting through a strong repulsive force. Inspired by the one-dimensional case where the fermionization phenomenon takes place in the strongly-interacting limit, we will study whether in two dimensions there is a resembling reminiscent effect. In other words, we will analyze if there are properties of the two strongly-interacting bosons in two dimensions that are like the ones of two noninteracting fermions.\n\n\t\t\t\t After that, we will tackle the localization phenomenon in a one-dimensional system that is caused by an external speckle potential that introduces disorder in the system. We will show that the localization is a robust phenomenon against repulsive contact interactions.\n\n\t\t\t\t Finally, we will study the influence of the spin-orbit coupling in a system of bosons with two possible pseudospin components, associated, for instance, to two hyperfine levels, confined in a two-dimensional harmonic trap. We will present an exhaustive analysis of the combined effects of the interaction and the spin-orbit coupling in the spectrum and the properties of the system. In particular we show the existence of a crossover in the ground state of the system susceptible to be experimentally identified.