Publication : t15/193

Nonlocal Coulomb Interactions and ElectronicCorrelations: Novel Many-Body Approaches

Ayral T. (CEA, IPhT (Institut de Physique Théorique), F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France)
Abstract:
In strongly correlated materials, quantum fluctuations taking place at the level of atomic sites play a central role. These local processes are captured nonperturbatively in dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). Nonlocal mechanisms, however, are also suspected to be essential for the proper description of some of these materials, including the well-known high-temperature cuprate superconductors and the more exotic systems of atoms adsorbed on semiconducting surfaces. In this thesis, the effect of nonlocal, potentially long-range fluctuations beyond the DMFT framework is investigated from two angles. First, long-ranged interactions in adatom systems, computed from first principles within the constrained random-phase approximation (cRPA), are treated within the extended DMFT (EDMFT) framework and its combination with the diagrammatic GW method (GW +EDMFT). They are shown to explain some material trends observed in these compounds. In addition, thanks to the spatial and temporal information delivered by GW +EDMFT, they solve existing puzzles raised by different experimental conclusions drawn from different probes. Second, a new approach to the Hubbard model including nonlocal correlation effects is proposed. Formally based on the local expansion of the triply-irreducible functional, this approach, dubbed TRILEX, approxi- mates the renormalized three-leg electron-boson vertex by a local but frequency-dependent vertex computed from an impurity model with retarded density-density and spin-spin interactions. This local vertex is used to construct frequency- and momentum-dependent self-energies capturing nonlocal correlation effects. By construction, this method reconciles two theoretical pictures of cuprate superconductors, namely the spin fluctuation theory at weak interaction strengths and the doped-Mott-insulator picture at strong coupling. This novel approach is applied to the single-band Hubbard model. It is shown to reduce to DMFT at strong coupling and high temperatures, and to fluctuation-exchange theories at weak coupling, while substantial de- viations from both limits are observed at intermediate coupling. There, upon doping, antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations are observed to lead to a momentum-differentiated spectral intensity on the Fermi surface, which is reminiscent of the formation of Fermi arcs in photoemission measurements on cuprate superconductors. These two methodological developments are intrinsically linked to algorithmic aspects which are reviewed in the last part of this work. In particular, an open-source library dedicated to massively parallel computations in the field of quantum many-body physics, TRIQS, is presented, with a focus on error estimation through the binning and jackknife methods. The hybridization-expansion continuous-time quantum Monte-Carlo al- gorithm in the segment picture – central to the TRILEX method – and its state-of-the-art implementation are explained. Finally, as a further illustration, a new lightweight method relying on this algorithm and de- signed for realistic systems, the combined screened-exchange and dynamical DMFT method (SEx+DDMFT), is presented together with an application to the BaCo2As2 compound.
Année de publication : 2015
Soutenance de thèse : par Thomas Ayral; ; ; 2015-09-28 / 2015-09-28
Langue : Anglais

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