No Arabic abstract
We study the real-time dynamics of a highly excited charge carrier coupled to quantum phonons via a Holstein-type electron-phonon coupling. This is a prototypical example for the non-equilibrium dynamics in an interacting many-body system where excess energy is transferred from electronic to phononic degrees of freedom. We use diagonalization in a limited functional space (LFS) to study the non-equilibrium dynamics on a finite one-dimensional chain. This method agrees with exact diagonalization and the time-evolving block decimation method, in both the relaxation regime and the long-time stationary state, and among these three methods it is the most efficient and versatile one for this problem. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the time evolution by calculating the electron, phonon and electron-phonon coupling energies, and the electronic momentum distribution function. The numerical results are compared to analytical solutions for short times, for a small hopping amplitude and for a weak electron-phonon coupling. In the latter case, the relaxation dynamics obtained from the Boltzmann equation agrees very well with the LFS data. We also study the time dependence of the eigenstates of the single-site reduced density matrix, which defines so-called optimal phonon modes. We discuss their structure in non-equilibrium and the distribution of their weights. Our analysis shows that the structure of optimal phonon modes contains very useful information for the interpretation of the numerical data.
We study the Holstein model of spinless fermions, which at half-filling exhibits a quantum phase transition from a metallic Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid phase to an insulating charge-density-wave (CDW) phase at a critical electron-phonon coupling strength. In our work, we focus on the real-time evolution starting from two different types of initial states that are CDW ordered: (i) ideal CDW states with and without additional phonons in the system and (ii) correlated ground states in the CDW phase. We identify the mechanism for CDW melting in the ensuing real-time dynamics and show that it strongly depends on the type of initial state. We focus on the far-from-equilibrium regime and emphasize the role of electron-phonon coupling rather than dominant electronic correlations, thus complementing a previous study of photo-induced CDW melting [H. Hashimoto and S. Ishihara, Phys. Rev. B 96, 035154 (2017)]. The numerical simulations are performed by means of matrix-product-state based methods with a local basis optimization (LBO). Within these techniques, one rotates the local (bosonic) Hilbert spaces adaptively into an optimized basis that can then be truncated while still maintaining a high precision. In this work, we extend the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm with LBO, previously applied to single-polaron dynamics, to a half-filled system. We demonstrate that in some parameter regimes, a conventional TEBD method without LBO would fail. Furthermore, we introduce and use a ground-state density-matrix renormalization group method for electron-phonon systems using local basis optimization. In our examples, we account for up to $M_{rm ph} = 40$ bare phonons per site by working with $O(10)$ optimal phonon modes.
We study the real-time dynamics of a pair hole/doubly-occupied-site, namely a holon and a doublon, in a 1D Hubbard insulator with on-site and nearest-neighbor Coulomb repulsion. Our analysis shows that the pair is long-lived and the expected decay mechanism to underlying spin excitations is actually inefficient. For a nonzero inter-site Coulomb repulsion, we observe that part of the wave-function remains in a bound state. Our study also provides insight on the holon-doublon propagation in real space. Due to the one-dimensional nature of the problem, these particles move in opposite directions even in the absence of an applied electric field. The potential relevance of our results to solar cell applications is discussed.
We use a recently developed extension of the weak coupling diagrammatic determinantal quantum Monte Carlo method to investigate the spin, charge and single particle spectral functions of the one-dimensional quarter-filled Holstein model with phonon frequency $omega_0 = 0.1 t$. As a function of the dimensionless electron-phonon coupling we observe a transition from a Luttinger to a Luther-Emery liquid with dominant $2k_f$ charge fluctuations. Emphasis is placed on the temperature dependence of the single particle spectral function. At high temperatures and in both phases it is well accounted for within a self-consistent Born approximation. In the low temperature Luttinger liquid phase we observe features which compare favorably with a bosonization approach retaining only forward scattering. In the Luther-Emery phase, the spectral function at low temperatures shows a quasiparticle gap which matches half the spin gap whereas at temperatures above which this quasiparticle gap closes, characteristic features of the Luttinger liquid model are apparent. Our results are based on lattice simulations on chains up to L=20 for two-particle properties and on CDMFT calculations with clusters up to 12 sites for the single-particle spectral function.
We study the interplay between the electron-phonon (e-ph) and on-site electron-electron (e-e) interactions in a three-orbital Hubbard-Holstein model on an extended one-dimensional lattice using determinant quantum Monte Carlo. For weak e-e and e-ph interactions, we observe a competition between an orbital-selective Mott phase (OSMP) and a (multicomponent) charge-density-wave (CDW) insulating phase, with an intermediate metallic phase located between them. For large e-e and e-ph couplings, the OSMP and CDW phases persist, while the metallic phase develops short-range orbital correlations and becomes insulating when both the e-e and e-ph interactions are large but comparable. Many of our conclusions are in line with those drawn from a prior dynamical mean field theory study of the two-orbital Hubbard-Holstein model [Phys. Rev. B 95, 12112(R) (2017)] in infinite dimension, suggesting that the competition between the e-ph and e-e interactions in multiorbital Hubbard-Holstein models leads to rich physics, regardless of the dimension of the system.
The effect of electron-electron interactions on Dirac fermions, and the possibility of an intervening spin liquid phase between the semi-metal and antiferromagnetic (AF) regimes, has been a focus of intense quantum simulation effort over the last five years. We use determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) to study the Holstein model on a Honeycomb lattice and explore the role of electron-phonon interactions on Dirac fermions. We show that they give rise to charge density wave (CDW) order, and present evidence that this occurs only above a finite critical interaction strength. We evaluate the temperature for the transition into the CDW which, unlike the AF transition, can occur at finite values owing to the discrete nature of the broken symmetry.