First-order phase transitions in many-fermion systems are not detected in the susceptibility analysis of common renormalization-group (RG) approaches. Here, we introduce a counterterm technique within the functional renormalization-group (fRG) formalism which allows access to all stable and metastable configurations. It becomes possible to study symmetry-broken states which occur through first-order transitions as well as hysteresis phenomena. For continuous transitions, the standard results are reproduced. As an example, we study discrete-symmetry breaking in a mean-field model for a commensurate charge-density wave. An additional benefit of the approach is that away from the critical temperature for the breaking of discrete symmetries large interactions can be avoided at all RG scales.
We present a functional renormalization group (fRG) flow for many-fermion lattice models into phases with broken spin-rotational symmetry. The flow is expressed purely in terms of fermionic vertex functions. The symmetry breaking is seeded by a small initial anomalous self-energy which grows at the transition scale and which prevents a runaway flow at nonzero scales. Focusing on the case of commensurate antiferromagnetism, we discuss how the interaction vertex can be parametrized efficiently. For reduced models with long-range bare interactions, we show the results of standard mean-field theory are reproduced by the fRG and how anisotropies in the spin sector change the flows. We then describe a more efficient decomposition of the interaction vertex that should allow for the treatment of more general models.
We present a functional renormalization group (fRG) formalism for interacting fermions on lattices that captures the flow into states with commensurate spin-density-wave order. During the flow, the growth of the order parameter is fed back into the flow of the interactions and all modes can be integrated out. This extends previous fRG flows in the symmetric phase that run into a divergence at a nonzero RG scale, i.e., that have to be stopped at the ordering scale. We use the corresponding Ward identity to check the accuracy of the results. We apply our method to a model with two Fermi pockets that have perfect particle-hole nesting. The results obtained from the fRG are compared with those in random-phase approximation.
We extend the functional renormalization group technique in a modi cation of the one‐particle irreducible scheme to study discrete symmetry breaking at nite temperature. As an instructive example, we employ the technique to access both the symmetric and the symmetry‐broken phase of a charge‐density wave mean‐ eld model. We study the half‐ lled case, and thus the breaking of a discrete symmetry, at nite temperature. A small external symmetry‐breaking eld allows us to access the symmetry‐broken state without encountering any divergence in the o w. We show diagrammatically that our method is equivalent to an exact resummation treatment. We numerically study the dependence of the o w on the external eld and on temperature.
We explore the possibilities of using the fermionic functional renormalization group to compute the phase diagram of systems with competing instabilities. In order to overcome the ubiquituous divergences encountered in RG flows, we propose to use symmetry breaking counterterms for each instability, and employ a self-consistency condition for fixing the counterterms. As a validity check, results are compared to known exact results for the case of one-dimensional systems. We find that whilst one-dimensional peculiarities, in particular algebraically decaying correlation functions, can not be reproduced, the phase boundaries are reproduced accurately, encouraging further explorations for higher-dimensional systems.
In frustrated magnetism, making a stringent connection between microscopic spin models and macroscopic properties of spin liquids remains an important challenge. A recent step towards this goal has been the development of the pseudofermion functional renormalization group approach (pf-FRG) which, building on a fermionic parton construction, enables the numerical detection of the onset of spin liquid states as temperature is lowered. In this work, focusing on the
SU(N) Heisenberg model at large
N, we extend this approach in a way that allows us to directly enter the low-temperature spin liquid phase, and to probe its character. Our approach proceeds in momentum space, making it possible to keep the truncation minimalistic, while also avoiding the bias introduced by an explicit decoupling of the fermionic parton interactions into a given channel. We benchmark our findings against exact mean-field results in the large-
N limit, and show that even without prior knowledge the pf-FRG approach identifies the correct mean-field decoupling channel. On a technical level, we introduce an alternative finite temperature regularization scheme that is necessitated to access the spin liquid ordered phase. In a companion paper [Buessen et al., Phys. Rev. B 97, 064415 (2018)] we present a different set of modifications of the pf-FRG scheme that allow us to study
SU(N) Heisenberg models (using a real-space RG approach) for arbitrary values of
N, albeit only up to the phase transition towards spin liquid physics.