arXiv:cond-mat/9810093 · Physical review. B, Condensed matter
Density-matrix renormalization group for a gapless system of free fermions
Martin Andersson, Magnus Boman, Stellan S. Ostlund
Abstract
We investigate convergence of the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) in the thermodynamic limit for gapless systems. Although the DMRG correlations always decay exponentially in the thermodynamic limit, the correlation length at the DMRG fixed-point scales as $\ensuremath{\xi}\ensuremath{\sim}{m}^{1.3},$ where m is the number of kept states, indicating the existence of algebraic order for the exact system. The single-particle excitation spectrum is calculated, using a Bloch-wave ansatz, and we prove that the Bloch-wave ansatz leads to the symmetry $E(k)=E(\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{-}k)$ for translationally invariant half-integer spin-systems with local interactions. Finally, we provide a method to compute overlaps between ground states obtained from different DMRG calculations.