DMRG method for the linear DC-conductance of one-dimensional correlated systems

Jan-Moritz Bischoff

Published Jan 1, 2019• 0 citations

Abstract

Interesting discoveries have recently been made in the area of solid state physics and nano technology regarding electronic systems that are confined to reduced spatial dimensions. Under these circumstances the quantum nature of the electrons begins to surface. In the one-dimensional case this class of systems is therefore called quantum- or nano wires. The conductance in such quantum wires becomes quantized and is dominated by electronic correlations. The goal of this thesis was to develop a fast and efficient procedure to describe a realistic transport measurement for such systems. The method presented here is in- spired by the work of Dan Bohr et al. who used the Density Matrix Renormalization Group algorithm(DMRG) to evaluate the Kubo formula for the linear response to an applied potential. In a similar way the procedure of this thesis also computes the Kubo formula using the dynamical DMRG in order to calculate the low frequency response to an AC source-drain voltage of finite systems. Making use of a special finite size scaling allows to extrapolate the results into the thermodynamic limit and to finally obtain the linear DC-conductance. First, the theoretical framework for the new method was developed. This was fol- lowed by testing the new approach in different model systems. The first model com- prised of a tight-binding chain that was filled with spinless, noninteracting fermions. In subsequent steps the model was expanded by introducing a homogeneous in- teraction in the Luttinger liquid regime followed by inhomogeneous interaction for different chain sections. The potential impact of impurities was assessed in the above models. Lastly, the two cases of the Hubbard chain of spin- 2 1 electrons and of the Holstein model in one dimension, where Einstein phonons interact with spinless fermions, were studied. The results of the proposed method are consistent with Luttinger liquid and Lan- dauer scattering theory. In the Luttinger liquid regime the influence of phonons to the charge structure factor was confirmed. A dependency on the length of the quantum wire in the form of dissipation effects for the conductance was not observed.

DOI: 10.15488/9181

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