Condensed-Matter Physics & Materials Science Seminar

In my talk I will present the numerical renormalization group (NRG) as a viable multi-band impurity solver for dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). NRG offers unprecedented real-frequency spectral resolution at arbitrarily low energies and temperatures. It is thus perfectly suited to study "Hund metals" [1], which show - in experiments and theoretical DMFT calculations - puzzling behavior at unusually low energy scales, like Fermi-liquid behavior at low temperatures, a coherence-incoherence crossover with increasing temperature [2, 3] and fractional power laws for the imaginary part of the Matsubara self-energy in the incoherent regime, discovered already early on with continuous time quantum Monte Carlo (CTQMC) as DMFT solver [3]. I will explicitly demonstrate the advantages of NRG+DMFT in the context of a channel-symmetric three-band Anderson-Hund model on a Bethe lattice at 1/3 filling (with NRG exploiting the non-abelian SU(3) channel symmetry to reduce numerical costs) [4]. In contrast to CTQMC, our NRG+DMFT calculations finally settled the existence of a Fermi-liquid ground state. We further revealed new important insights: our real-frequency one-particle spectral function shows a coherence-incoherence crossover (driven by Hund J rather than Hubbard U) and strong particle-hole asymmetry, which leads to the above-mentioned apparent fractional power laws; two-stage screening, where spin screening occurs at much lower energies than orbital screening ("spin-orbital separation"); and zero-temperature spectral properties that are similar with or without DMFT self-consistency, in contrast to Mott-Hubbard systems, where the DMFT self-consistency opens a gap. A recent reformulation of NRG, called "interleaved NRG" (iNRG) [5, 6] allows to tackle more realistic models of Hund metals where channel symmetries are generally broken (for example, due to crystal field splitting).