Strongly correlated electrons: Analytic mean-field theories with two-particle self-consistency

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Many-body systems are those in which particle interactions cannot be neglected. In particular, when they are strong, they cause critical fluctuations and may lead to qualitative changes and phase transitions in extended systems. The critical behavior must be treated self-consistently.  Even simple models of correlated elementary objects are, however, unsolvable. We hence must resort to approximations, apart from a few limiting cases where exact partial solutions exist. We gain the  approximations either from numerical simulations  or from semi-analytic calculations. The numerical approach tends to offer unbiased approximations with all degrees of freedom left in play, while the analytic approximations are based on a reduction of complexity of interaction effects. The numerical calculations offer  good quantitative predictions  that can set trends in the dependence of the solution on the  model input parameters. The latter schemes aspire to reproduce qualitative features of the exact solution. They, unlike the numerical methods,  can address and control  singularities directly.

Spectral functions
Description
Figure 1: Spectral function at half filling calculated within the static approximation for the irreducible two-particle vertex  with the thermodynamic propagator, without one-particle self-consistency,  (noSC), the full propagator with one-particle self-consistency (SC) in the reduced parquet equations compared with numerical renormalization group (NRG) for several values of the interaction U in energy units Δ from weak to strong coupling. Formation of the central and satellite peaks is well demonstrated.

The basic and first analytic estimates of the model solutions are mean-field theories. A two-particle self-consistency is rarely part of mean-field theories. It is, however, essential for avoiding spurious critical transitions and unphysical behavior. We present a general scheme for constructing analytically controllable approximations with self-consistent equations for the two-particle vertices, determining the response of the interacting systems on external perturbations, based on the parquet equations. We explain in detail how to reduce the full set of analytically unsolvable parquet equations not to miss quantum criticality in strong coupling. We further introduce a decoupling of  convolutions of the dynamical variables in the Bethe-Salpeter equations to make them analytically solvable in the critical regions of their singularities. We connect the self-energy with the two-particle vertices to satisfy the thermodynamic Ward identity and the dynamical Schwinger-Dyson equation and discuss the role of the one-particle self-consistency in making the approximations reliable in the whole spectrum of the input parameters. Finally, we  demonstrate the general construction on the simplest static approximation that we apply to the Kondo behavior of the single-impurity Anderson model. We qualitatively reproduced the behavior of the exact algebraic solution in the Kondo limit.

Spectral functions
Description
Figure 2: Spectral function at half filling calculated  for majority spin component from the reduced parquet equations (parquet)  for several strengths of the magnetic field h in energy units Δ compared with the NRG result. The trend of moving of the central peak towards the occupied satellite and its merge is in both solutions in good agreement.

Kontaktní osoba: Václav Janiš