Renormalization group approach to the Fröhlich polaron model: application to impurity-BEC problem.

When a mobile impurity interacts with a many-body system, such as a phonon bath, a polaron is formed. Despite the importance of the polaron problem for a wide range of physical systems, a unified theoretical description valid for arbitrary coupling strengths is still lacking. Here we develop a renormalization group approach for analyzing a paradigmatic model of polarons, the so-called Fröhlich model, and apply it to a problem of impurity atoms immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate of ultra cold atoms. Polaron energies obtained by our method are in excellent agreement with recent diagrammatic Monte Carlo calculations for a wide range of interaction strengths. They are found to be logarithmically divergent with the ultra-violet cut-off, but physically meaningful regularized polaron energies are also presented. Moreover, we calculate the effective mass of polarons and find a smooth crossover from weak to strong coupling regimes. Possible experimental tests of our results in current experiments with ultra cold atoms are discussed.

Plasmons in strongly correlated systems: spectral weight transfer and renormalized dispersion.

We study the charge-density dynamics within the two-dimensional extended Hubbard model in the presence of long-range Coulomb interaction across the metal-insulator transition point. To take into account strong correlations we start from self-consistent extended dynamical mean-field theory and include nonlocal dynamical vertex corrections through a ladder approximation to the polarization operator. This is necessary to fulfill charge conservation and to describe plasmons in the correlated state. The calculated plasmon spectra are qualitatively different from those in the random-phase approximation: they exhibit a spectral density transfer and a renormalized dispersion with enhanced deviation from the canonical √q behavior. Both features are reminiscent of interaction induced changes found in single-electron spectra of strongly correlated systems.

Efficient perturbation theory for quantum lattice models.

We present a novel approach to long-range correlations beyond dynamical mean-field theory, through a ladder approximation to dual fermions. The new technique is applied to the two-dimensional Hubbard model. We demonstrate that the transformed perturbation series for the nonlocal dual fermions has superior convergence properties over standard diagrammatic techniques. The critical Néel temperature of the mean-field solution is suppressed in the ladder approximation, in accordance with quantum Monte Carlo results. An illustration of how the approach captures and allows us to distinguish short- and long-range correlations is given.

Understanding the electronic structure and magnetism of correlated nanosystems.

In this paper we review recent developments towards a realistic description of the electronic structure and magnetism of correlated nanosystems. A new class of so-called continuous-time solvers for the quantum impurity problem is discussed, which provides a numerically exact solution without systematic errors due to imaginary time discretization. These solvers are able to handle general interactions, like the full Coulomb vertex. We further show how four-point or higher-order correlation functions of the impurity problem can be computed. This allows the calculation of dynamical susceptibilities which provide information about spin excitations. Moreover, we discuss a principally new many-body scheme recently proposed for the description of non-local correlations in strongly correlated systems. This approach provides a basis for a many-body description of extended correlated nanostructures on a substrate.

Correlated adatom trimer on a metal surface: a continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo study.

The problem of three interacting Kondo impurities is solved within a numerically exact continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo scheme. A suppression of the Kondo resonance by interatomic exchange interactions for different cluster geometries is investigated. It is shown that a drastic difference between the Heisenberg and Ising cases appears for antiferromagnetically coupled adatoms. The effects of magnetic frustrations in the adatom trimer are investigated, and possible connections with available experimental data are discussed.