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arXiv:cond-mat/0502067 · Physical Review B

Benchmarkings for a semiclassical impurity solver for dynamical-mean-field theory: Self-energies and magnetic transitions of the single-orbital Hubbard model

Satoshi Okamoto, Andreas Fuhrmann, Armin Comanac, Andrew J. Millis

Published Jun 24, 2005• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

An investigation is presented of the utility of semiclassical approximations for solving the quantum-impurity problems arising in the dynamical-mean-field approach to correlated-electron models. The method is based on performing an exact numerical integral over the zero-Matsubara-frequency component of the spin part of a continuous Hubbard-Stratonovich field, along with a spin-field-dependent steepest descent treatment of the charge part. We test this method by applying it to one- or two-site approximations to the single-band Hubbard model with different band structures, and comparing the results to quantum Monte Carlo and simplified exact diagonalization calculations. The resulting electron self-energies, densities of states, and magnetic transition temperatures show reasonable agreement with the quantum Monte Carlo simulation over wide parameter ranges, suggesting that the semiclassical method is useful for obtaining a reasonable picture of the physics in situations where other techniques are too expensive.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.71.235113

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An investigation is presented of the utility of semiclassical approximations for solving the quantum-impurity problems arising in the dynamical-mean-field approach to correlated-electron models. The method is based on performing an exact numerical integral over the zero-Matsubara-frequency component of the spin part of a continuous Hubbard-Stratonovich field, along with a spin-field-dependent steepest descent treatment of the charge part. We test this method by applying it to one- or two-site approximations to the single-band Hubbard model with different band structures, and comparing the results to quantum Monte Carlo and simplified exact diagonalization calculations. The resulting electron self-energies, densities of states, and magnetic transition temperatures show reasonable agreement with the quantum Monte Carlo simulation over wide parameter ranges, suggesting that the semiclassical method is useful for obtaining a reasonable picture of the physics in situations where other techniques are too expensive.
We propose that a combination of the semiclassical approximation with Monte Carlo simulations can be an efficient and reliable impurity solver for dynamical mean field theory equations and their cluster extensions with large cluster sizes. In order to show the reliability of the method, we consider two test cases: (i) the single-band Hubbard model within the dynamical cluster approximation with four- and eight-site clusters and (ii) the anisotropic two-orbital Hubbard model with orbitals of different bandwidth within the single-site dynamical mean field theory. We compare the critical interaction Uc/t{U}_{c}/tUc​/t with those obtained from solving the dynamical mean field equations with the continuous-time and Hirsch-Fye quantum Monte Carlo approaches. In both test cases we observe reasonable values of the metal-insulator critical interaction strength Uc/t{U}_{c}/tUc​/t and the nature of Mott physics in the self-energy behavior. While some details of the spectral functions cannot be captured by the semiclassical approximation due to the freezing of dynamical fluctuations, the main features are reproduced by the approach.
We develop a fast impurity solver which is based on the combination of Hubbard-I approximation and hybridization expansion continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo algorithm. This solver inherits the advantages of both algorithms. In order to demonstrate the power and usefulness of this solver, we use it to study the magnetic phase transitions of single-band and two-band Hubbard models in the framework of single-site dynamical mean-field theory. The calculated results agree well with those obtained by hybridization expansion quantum impurity solver. It is suggested that this solver is very suitable to solve the multi-orbital quantum impurity models efficiently and can be used to study more realistic systems with magnetic long-range order in the future.
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.
Quantum Monte Carlo and semiclassical methods are used to solve two- and four-site cluster dynamical mean-field approximations to the square-lattice Hubbard model at half filling and strong coupling. The dyanmical cluster approximation, cluster dynamical mean-field theory, and fictive-impurity approaches are compared. The energy, spin correlation function, phase boundary, and electron spectral function are computed and compared to available exact results. The comparision permits a quantitative assessment of the ability of the different methods to capture the effects of intersite spin correlations. Two real-space methods and one momentum-space representation are investigated. One of the two real-space methods is found to be significantly worse: in it, convergence to the correct results is found to be slow and, for the spectral function, nonuniform in frequency, with unphysical midgap states appearing. Analytical arguments are presented showing that the discrepancy arises because the method does not respect the pole structure of the self-energy of the insulator. Of the other two methods, the momentum-space representation is found to provide the better approximation to the intersite terms in the energy but neither approximation is particularly acccurate and the convergence of the momentum-space method is not uniform. A few remarks on numerical methods are made.
We study the Mott insulating state of the half-filled paramagnetic Hubbard model within dynamical mean field theory using a recently formulated stochastic and nonperturbative quantum impurity solver. The method is based on calculating the impurity self energy as a sample average over a representative distribution of impurity models solved by exact diagonalization. Due to the natural parallelization of the method, millions of poles are readily generated for the self energy which allows us to work with very small pole-broadening $\ensuremath{\eta}$. Solutions at small and large $\ensuremath{\eta}$ are qualitatively different; solutions at large $\ensuremath{\eta}$ show featureless Hubbard bands whereas solutions at small $\ensuremath{\eta}\ensuremath{\le}0.001$ (in units of half bare band width) show a band of electronic quasiparticles with very small quasiparticle weight at the inner edge of the Hubbard bands. The validity of the results are supported by agreement within statistical error ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{\text{QMC}}\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ on the imaginary frequency axis with calculations using a continuous time quantum Monte Carlo solver. Nevertheless, convergence with respect to finite size of the stochastic exact diagonalization solver remains to be rigourously established.
We present two related customized software packages, Hubb_DMFT and Wan2mb_DMFT, designed to solve the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) equations for strongly correlated electron systems. Hubb_DMFT is adjusted for the single-band Hubbard model, providing a fast way to calculate the local self-energy, as well as the two-particle fermion and triangular fermion-boson charge and spin vertices, while Wan2mb_DMFT extends this capability to realistic multi-orbital systems, directly interfacing Wannier tight-binding Hamiltonians with many-body solvers. Both codes are based on iQIST v.0.7 impurity solver and utilize a modified and internally integrated Continuous-Time Quantum Monte Carlo (CT-QMC) core with the hybridization expansion (CT-HYB) framework and improved self-energy and vertex estimators for density-density interaction, ensuring numerically exact solutions for quantum impurity problems.