Identifier

etd-07062011-140052

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

This thesis presents the development of new numerical methods for the treatment of strongly correlated electron systems based on self-consistent approaches at both the one and the two-particle level such as the parquet formalism. The parquet formalism was solved for the first time on a two-dimensional cluster. When the fully irreducible vertex is approximated by the bare vertex, we obtain the parquet approximation. Its validity was investigated by comparing results that it produces to those of other conserving approximations such as the FLuctuation EXchange (FLEX) approximation or the Second Order Perturbation Theory (SOPT). We found that it provides a significant improvement of FLEX or SOPT and a satisfactory agreement with Quantum Monte Carlo results despite instabilities in the self-consistency at low temperatures and for strong Coulomb interaction. We use the parquet formalism to study the Quantum Critical Point at finite doping in the Hubbard model by decomposing the vertex into its contributions from different channels. We apply this decomposition to the pairing channel and we find that the dominant contribution to the vertex originates in the spin channel even at the quantum critical doping. Furthermore, we explore the divergence of the two parts of the pairing matrix at optimal doping and observe that the irreducible vertex decreases monotonically as the doping is increased while the bare susceptibility exhibits an algebraic divergence at the quantum critical doping supporting the Quantum Critical BCS scenario proposed by She and Zaanen. To circumvent the instabilities in the iteration of the parquet formalism, we explored the dual fermion approach introduced by Rubtsov et al. Here, we extended the formalism to the Dynamical Cluster Approximation, in the process introducing a small parameter in the dual fermions perturbation theory. We demonstrate the quality of the resulting Dual Fermion DCA through a systematic study of the cluster size dependence and of the different perturbative approximations. These efforts represent the initial steps in the development of the Multi-Scale Many Body approach that appropriately treats correlations at different length scales.

Date

2011

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Jarrell, Mark

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_dissertations.811

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