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Nikolay V. Prokof'ev

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolay V. Prokof'ev.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Supersolid stripe crystal from finite-range interactions on a lattice

Strong, long-range interactions present a unique challenge for the theoretical investigation of quantum many-body lattice models, due to the generation of large numbers of competing states at low energy. Here, we investigate a class of extended bosonic Hubbard models with off-site terms interpolating between short and infinite range, thus allowing for an exact numerical solution for all interaction strengths. We predict a novel type of stripe crystal at strong coupling. Most interestingly, for intermediate interaction strengths we demonstrate that the stripes can turn superfluid, thus leading to a self-assembled array of quasi-one-dimensional superfluids. These bosonic superstripes turn into an isotropic supersolid with decreasing the interaction strength. The mechanism for stripe formation is based on cluster self-assembling in the corresponding classical ground state, reminiscent of classical soft-matter models of polymers, different from recently proposed mechanisms for cold gases of alkali or dipolar magnetic atoms.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

Orthogonality catastrophe in Coulomb systems

The orthogonality catastrophe (OC) problem is considered solved for 50 years. It has important consequences for numerous dynamic phenomena in fermionic systems, including Kondo effect, X-ray spectroscopy, and quantum diffusion of impurities, and is often used in the context of metals. However, the key assumptions on which the known solution is based---impurity potentials with finite cross-section and non-interacting fermions---are both highly inaccurate for problems involving charged particles in metals. As far as we know, the OC problem for the "all Coulomb" case has never been addressed systematically, leaving it unsolved for the most relevant practical applications. In this work we include effects of dynamic screening in a consistent way and demonstrate that for short-range impurity potentials the non-interacting Fermi-sea approximation radically overestimates the power-law decay exponent of the overlap integral. We also find that the dynamically screened Coulomb potential leads to a larger exponent than the often used static Yukawa potential. Finally, by employing the Diagrammatic Monte Carlo technique, we quantify effects of a finite impurity mass and reveal how OC physics leads to small, but finite, impurity residues.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Implicit renormalization approach to the problem of Cooper instability

In the vast majority of cases, superconducting transition takes place at exponentially low temperature $T_c$ out of the Fermi liquid regime. We discuss the problem of determining $T_c$ from known system properties at temperatures $T \gg T_c$, and stress that this cannot be done reliably by following the standard protocol of solving for the largest eigenvalue of the original gap-function equation. However, within the implicit renormalization approach, the gap-function equation can be used to formulate an alternative eigenvalue problem, solving which leads to an accurate prediction for both $T_c$ and the gap function immediately below $T_c$. With the diagrammatic Monte Carlo techniques, this eigenvalue problem can be solved without invoking the matrix inversion or even explicitly calculating the four-point vertex function.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

Polaron mobility in the "beyond quasiparticles" regime

In a number of physical situations, from polarons to Dirac liquids and to non-Fermi liquids, one encounters the "beyond quasiparticles" regime, in which the inelastic scattering rate exceeds the thermal energy of quasiparticles. Transport in this regime cannot be described by the kinetic equation. We employ the Diagrammatic Monte Carlo method to study the mobility of a Fröhlich polaron in this regime and discover a number of non-perturbative effects: a strong violation of the Mott-Ioffe-Regel criterion at intermediate and strong couplings, a mobility minimum at $T \sim Ω$ in the strong-coupling limit ($Ω$ is the optical mode frequency), a substantial delay in the onset of an exponential dependence of the mobility for $T<Ω$ at intermediate coupling, and complete smearing of the Drude peak at strong coupling. These effects should be taken into account when interpreting mobility data in materials with strong electron-phonon coupling.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Phase diagram topology of the Haldane-Hubbard-Coulomb model

We study the phase diagram of the interacting spin-$1/2$ Haldane model with chiral phase $ϕ= π/2$ at half-filling. Both on-site and long-range Coulomb repulsive interactions (Haldane-Hubbard-Coulomb model) are considered. The problem with on-site interaction $U$ alone was addressed in the past by a variety of approximate and finite size methods that produced results in disagreement with each other both quantitatively and qualitatively. Here we employ the Diagrammatic Monte Carlo technique to accurately locate phase transition points to the topologically nontrivial phases in the $(Δ, U)$-plane, where $\pm Δ$ is the inversion symmetry breaking on-site energy, and establish that momentum dependence of self-energy cannot be neglected in the proper treatment. We also find that even modest long-range interactions, typically discarded in theoretical considerations, result in significant shifts of transition lines.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Stochastic lists: Sampling multi-variable functions with population methods

We introduce the method of stochastic lists to deal with a multi-variable positive function, defined by a self-consistent equation, typical for certain problems in physics and mathematics. In this approach, the function's properties are represented statistically by lists containing a large collection of sets of coordinates (or "walkers") that are distributed according to the function's value. The coordinates are generated stochastically by the Metropolis algorithm and may replace older entries according to some protocol. While stochastic lists offer a solution to the impossibility of efficiently computing and storing multi-variable functions without a systematic bias, extrapolation in the inverse of the number of walkers is usually difficult, even though in practice very good results are found already for short lists. This situation is reminiscent of diffusion Monte Carlo, and is hence generic for all population-based methods. We illustrate the method by computing the lowest-order vertex corrections in Hedin's scheme for the Fröhlich polaron and the ground state energy and wavefunction of the Heisenberg model in two dimensions.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Algebraic Time Crystallization in a Two-dimensional Superfluid

Time crystallization is a hallmark of superfluidity, indicative of the fundamental fact that along with breaking the global U(1) symmetry, superfluids also break time-translation symmetry. While the standard discussion of the time crystallization phenomenon is based on the notion of the global phase and genuine condensate, for the superfluidity to take place in two dimensions an algebraic (topological) order is sufficient. We find that the absence of long-range order in a finite-temperature two-dimensional superfluid translates into in an algebraic time crystallization caused by the temporal phase correlations. The exponent controlling the algebraic decay is a universal function of the superfluid-stiffness-to-temperature ratio; this exponent can be also seen in the power-law singularity of the Fourier spectrum of the AC Josephson current. We elaborate on subtleties involved in defining the phenomenon of time crystallization in both classical-filed and all-quantum cases and propose an experimental protocol in which the broken time translation symmetry---more precisely, temporal correlations of the relative phase, with all possible finite-size, dimensional, and quantum effects included---can be observed without permanently keeping two superfluids in a contact.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Trapping Collapse

Weak potential wells (or traps) in one and two dimensions, and the potential wells slightly deeper than the critical ones in three dimensions, feature shallow bound states with localization length much larger than the well radii. We address a simple fundamental question of how many repulsively interacting bosons can be localized by such traps. We find that under rather generic conditions, for both weakly and strongly repulsive particles, in two and three dimensions--but not in one-dimension!--the potential well can trap infinitely many bosons. For example, even hard-core repulsive interactions do not prevent this "trapping collapse" phenomenon from taking place. For the weakly interacting/dilute regime, the effect can be revealed by the mean-field argument, while in the case of strong correlations the evidence comes from path-integral simulations. We also discuss the possibility of having a transition between the infinite and finite number of trapped particles when strong repulsive inter-particle correlations are increased.

cond-mat.quant-gas↗

Towards the solution of the many-electron problem in real materials: equation of state of the hydrogen chain with state-of-the-art many-body methods

We present numerical results for the equation of state of an infinite chain of hydrogen atoms. A variety of modern many-body methods are employed, with exhaustive cross-checks and validation. Approaches for reaching the continuous space limit and the thermodynamic limit are investigated, proposed, and tested. The detailed comparisons provide a benchmark for assessing the current state of the art in many-body computation, and for the development of new methods. The ground-state energy per atom in the linear chain is accurately determined versus bondlength, with a confidence bound given on all uncertainties.

physics.comp-ph↗

Dielectric function and thermodynamic properties of jellium in the GW approximation

The fully self-consistent GW approximation is an established method for electronic structure calculations. Its most serious deficiency is known to be an incorrect prediction of the dielectric response. In this work we examine the GW approximation for the homogeneous electron gas and find that problems with the dielectric response are solved by enforcing the particle-number conservation law in the polarization function. Previously reported data for the ground-state energy were plainly contradicting each other well outside of reported error bounds. Some of these results created a false impression of how accurate the fully self-consistent GW approximation is. We resolve this controversy by confirming that only Ref. [15] was reporting correct energy data, and present values for other key Fermi-liquid properties.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Grassmannization of classical models

Applying Feynman diagrammatics to non-fermionic strongly correlated models with local constraints might seem generically impossible for two separate reasons: (i) the necessity to have a Gaussian (non-interacting) limit on top of which the perturbative diagrammatic expansion is generated by Wick's theorem, and (ii) the Dyson's collapse argument implying that the expansion in powers of coupling constant is divergent. We show that for arbitrary classical lattice models both problems can be solved/circumvented by reformulating the high-temperature expansion (more generally, any discrete representation of the model) in terms of Grassmann integrals. Discrete variables residing on either links, plaquettes, or sites of the lattice are associated with the Grassmann variables in such a way that the partition function (and correlations) of the original system and its Grassmann-field counterpart are identical. The expansion of the latter around its Gaussian point generates Feynman diagrams. A proof-of-principle implementation is presented for the classical 2D Ising model. Our work paves the way for studying lattice gauge theories by treating bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom on equal footing.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Emergent BCS regime of the two-dimensional fermionic Hubbard model: ground-state phase diagram

A significant part of the phase diagram of the two-dimensional fermionic Hubbard model for moderate interactions and filling factors ($U < 4, \, n<0.7$) is governed by effective Fermi liquid physics with weak BCS-type instabilities. We access this regime in a controlled way by a combination of the bold-line diagrammatic Monte Carlo method with an additional ladder-diagram summation trick and semi-analytic treatment of the weak instability in the Cooper channel. We obtain the corresponding ground-state phase diagram in the $(n,U)$ plane describing the competition between the $p-$ and $d-$wave superfluid states. We also claim the values of the dimensionless BCS coupling constants controlling the superfluid $T_c$ at the phase boundaries, which prove to be very small up to $U=4, n = 0.6$.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Asymptotically Exact Scenario of Strong-Disorder Criticality in One-Dimensional Superfluids

We present a controlled rare-weak-link theory of the superfluid-to-Bose/Mott glass transition in one-dimensional disordered systems. The transition has Kosterlitz-Thouless critical properties but may occur at an arbitrary large value of the Luttinger parameter $K$. In contrast to the scenario by Altman {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 81}, 174528 (2010)], the hydrodynamic description is valid under the correlation radius and defines criticality via the renormalization of microscopically weak links, along the lines of Kane and Fisher [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 68}, 1220 (1992)]. The hallmark of the theory is the relation $K^{(c)}=1/ζ$ between the critical value of the Luttinger parameter at macroscopic scales and the microscopic (irrenormalizable) exponent $ζ$ describing the scaling $\propto 1/N^{1-ζ}$ for the strength of the weakest link among the $N/L \gg 1$ disorder realizations in a system of fixed mesoscopic size $L$.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Phase Diagram of Commensurate Two-Dimensional Disordered Bose Hubbard Model

We establish the full groundstate phase diagram of disordered Bose-Hubbard model in two-dimensions at unity filling factor via quantum Monte Carlo simulations. Similarly to the three-dimensional case we observe extended superfluid regions persisting up to extremely large values of disorder and interaction strength which, however, have small superfluid fractions and thus low transition temperatures. In the vicinity of the superfluid--insulator transition of the pure system, we observe an unexpectedly weak---almost not resolvable---sensitivity of the critical interaction to the strength of (weak) disorder.

cond-mat.other↗

Regularization of Diagrammatic Series with Zero Convergence Radius

The divergence of perturbative expansions for the vast majority of macroscopic systems, which follows from Dyson's collapse argument, prevents Feynman's diagrammatic technique from being directly used for controllable studies of strongly interacting systems. We show how the problem of divergence can be solved by replacing the original model with a convergent sequence of successive approximations which have a convergent perturbative series. As a prototypical model, we consider the zero-dimensional $\vert ψ\vert^4$ theory.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

Effects of finite temperature on the Mott insulator state

We investigate the effects of finite temperature on ultracold Bose atoms confined in an optical lattice plus a parabolic potential in the Mott insulator state. In particular, we analyze the temperature dependence of the density distribution of atomic pairs in the lattice, by means of exact Monte-Carlo simulations. We introduce a simple model that quantitatively accounts for the computed pair density distributions at low enough temperatures. We suggest that the temperature dependence of the atomic pair statistics may be used to estimate the system's temperature at energies of the order of the atoms' interaction energy.

cond-mat.other↗