No Arabic abstract
We propose an electron-phonon parameterization which reliably reproduces the geometry and harmonic frequencies of a real system. With respect to standard electron-phonon models, it adds a double-counting correction, which takes into account the lattice deformation as the system is dressed by low-energy electron-phonon processes. We show the importance of this correction by studying potassium-doped picene (K$_3$Picene), recently claimed to be a superconductor with a $T_c$ of up to 18 K. The Hamiltonian parameters are derived from ab-initio density functional theory, and the lattice model is solved by dynamical mean-field theory. Our calculations include the effects of electron-electron interactions and local electron-phonon couplings. Even with the inclusion of a strongly coupled molecular phonon, the Hubbard repulsion prevails and the system is an insulator with a small Mott gap of $approx$ 0.2 eV.
We show, by means of ab-initio calculations, that electron-electron correlations play an important role in potassium-doped picene ($K_x$-picene), recently characterized as a superconductor with $T_c = 18K$. The inclusion of exchange interactions by means of hybrid functionals reproduces the correct gap for the undoped compound and predicts an antiferromagnetic state for $x=3$, where superconductivity has been observed. The latter finding is compatible with a sizable value of the correlation strength, in agreement with simple estimates. Our results highlight the similarity between potassium-doped picene and alkali-doped fulleride superconductors.
This lecture note reviews recently proposed sparse-modeling approaches for efficient ab initio many-body calculations based on the data compression of Greens functions. The sparse-modeling techniques are based on a compact orthogonal basis representation, intermediate representation (IR) basis functions, for imaginary-time and Matsubara Greens functions. A sparse sampling method based on the IR basis enables solving diagrammatic equations efficiently. We describe the basic properties of the IR basis, the sparse sampling method and its applications to ab initio calculations based on the GW approximation and the Migdal-Eliashberg theory. We also describe a numerical library for the IR basis and the sparse sampling method, irbasis, and provide its sample codes. This lecture note follows the Japanese review article [H. Shinaoka et al., Solid State Physics 56(6), 301 (2021)].
Due to advances in computer hardware and new algorithms, it is now possible to perform highly accurate many-body simulations of realistic materials with all their intrinsic complications. The success of these simulations leaves us with a conundrum: how do we extract useful physical models and insight from these simulations? In this article, we present a formal theory of downfolding--extracting an effective Hamiltonian from first-principles calculations. The theory maps the downfolding problem into fitting information derived from wave functions sampled from a low-energy subspace of the full Hilbert space. Since this fitting process most commonly uses reduced density matrices, we term it density matrix downfolding (DMD).
We present the TRIQS/DFTTools package, an application based on the TRIQS library that connects this toolbox to realistic materials calculations based on density functional theory (DFT). In particular, TRIQS/DFTTools together with TRIQS allows an efficient implementation of DFT plus dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) calculations. It supplies tools and methods to construct Wannier functions and to perform the DMFT self-consistency cycle in this basis set. Post-processing tools, such as band-structure plotting or the calculation of transport properties are also implemented. The package comes with a fully charge self-consistent interface to the Wien2k band structure code, as well as a generic interface that allows to use TRIQS/DFTTools together with a large variety of DFT codes. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).
Charge-density waves are responsible for symmetry-breaking displacements of atoms and concomitant changes in the electronic structure. Linear response theories, in particular density-functional perturbation theory, provide a way to study the effect of displacements on both the total energy and the electronic structure based on a single ab initio calculation. In downfolding approaches, the electronic system is reduced to a smaller number of bands, allowing for the incorporation of additional correlation and environmental effects on these bands. However, the physical contents of this downfolded model and its potential limitations are not always obvious. Here, we study the potential-energy landscape and electronic structure of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, where all relevant quantities can be evaluated analytically. We compare the exact results at arbitrary displacement with diagrammatic perturbation theory both in the full model and in a downfolded effective single-band model, which gives an instructive insight into the properties of downfolding. An exact reconstruction of the potential-energy landscape is possible in a downfolded model, which requires a dynamical electron-biphonon interaction. The dispersion of the bands upon atomic displacement is also found correctly, where the downfolded model by construction only captures spectral weight in the target space. In the SSH model, the electron-phonon coupling mechanism involves exclusively hybridization between the low- and high-energy bands and this limits the computational efficiency gain of downfolded models.