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arXiv:cond-mat/0609438 · Physical Review B

Performance analysis of continuous-time solvers for quantum impurity models

Emanuel Gull, Philipp Werner, Andrew J. Millis, Matthias Troyer

Published Dec 21, 2007• 70 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Impurity solvers play an essential role in the numerical investigation of strongly correlated electrons systems within the ``dynamical mean field'' approximation. Recently, a new class of continuous-time solvers has been developed based on a diagrammatic expansion of the partition function in either the interactions or the impurity-bath hybridization. We investigate the performance of these two complementary approaches and compare them to the well-established Hirsch-Fye method. The results show that the continuous-time methods, and, in particular, the version which expands in the hybridization, provide substantial gains in computational efficiency.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.76.235123

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Impurity solvers play an essential role in the numerical investigation of strongly correlated electrons systems within the ``dynamical mean field'' approximation. Recently, a new class of continuous-time solvers has been developed based on a diagrammatic expansion of the partition function in either the interactions or the impurity-bath hybridization. We investigate the performance of these two complementary approaches and compare them to the well-established Hirsch-Fye method. The results show that the continuous-time methods, and, in particular, the version which expands in the hybridization, provide substantial gains in computational efficiency.
Quantum impurity models, which describe the coupling between interacting orbitals and a non-interacting bath, play a central role in the physics of strongly correlated electron systems. Solving a quantum impurity model in general requires the use of non-perturbative numerical methods. Hamiltonian-based approaches, which rely on an explicit bath discretization, are typically limited to a small number of bath sites or small entanglement, and diagrammatic methods suffer from sign problems, slow convergence, or diagram truncation approximations. Here we show that these two classes of methods can be combined: augmenting diagrammatic methods with a small auxiliary bath can reduce the residual problem to a regime where low-order perturbation theory is highly accurate and rapidly converging. In a simple benchmark, the precision of the hybrid approach surpasses bold-line calculations by several orders of magnitude; for a strongly interacting two-orbital model with a severe sign problem, convergence is achieved at three orders of magnitude lower computational cost than competing methods; and convergence to the unknown exact result is rapidly accelerated in a difficult realistic problem. Our results establish a practical route to high-precision quantum impurity solutions in correlated quantum systems.
We present a new continuous-time solver for quantum impurity models such as those relevant to dynamical mean field theory. It is based on a stochastic sampling of a perturbation expansion in the impurity-bath hybridization parameter. Comparisons with Monte Carlo and exact diagonalization calculations confirm the accuracy of the new approach, which allows very efficient simulations even at low temperatures and for strong interactions. As examples of the power of the method we present results for the temperature dependence of the kinetic energy and the free energy, enabling an accurate location of the temperature-driven metal-insulator transition.
Since the inception of the dynamical mean-field theory, numerous numerical studies have relied on the Hirsch-Fye quantum Monte Carlo (HF-QMC) method for solving the associated impurity problem. Recently developed continuous-time algorithms (CT-QMC) avoid the Trotter discretization error and allow for faster configuration updates, which makes them candidates for replacing HF-QMC. We demonstrate, however, that a state-of-the-art implementation of HF-QMC (with extrapolation of discretization $\ensuremath{\Delta}\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$) is competitive with CT-QMC. A quantitative analysis of Trotter errors in HF-QMC estimates and of appropriate $\ensuremath{\Delta}\ensuremath{\tau}$ values is included.