When strong correlations become weak: Consistent merging of $GW$ and DMFT

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that nonlocal Coulomb interactions and dynamical screening significantly weaken local interactions in SrVO$_3$, challenging traditional interpretations of its spectral features and highlighting the importance of these effects in correlated materials.

Contribution

The study introduces a fully self-consistent GW+extended DMFT approach that accounts for nonlocal interactions and screening, altering the understanding of spectral features in strongly correlated metals.

Findings

Nonlocal Coulomb interactions reduce effective local interactions.

Plasmonic effects produce satellite features matching experiments.

Hubbard bands are suppressed due to screening effects.

Abstract

The cubic perovskite SrVO$_3$ is generally considered to be a prototype strongly correlated metal with a characteristic three-peak structure of the $d$-electron spectral function, featuring a renormalized quasiparticle band in between pronounced Hubbard sidebands. Here we show that this interpretation, which has been supported by numerous "ab-initio" simulations, has to be reconsidered. Using a fully self-consistent $GW$+extended dynamical mean-field theory calculation we find that the screening from nonlocal Coulomb interactions substantially reduces the effective local Coulomb repulsion, and at the same time leads to strong plasmonic effects. The resulting effective local interactions are too weak to produce pronounced Hubbard bands in the local spectral function, while prominent plasmon satellites appear at energies which agree with those of the experimentally observed sidebands. Our results demonstrate the important role of nonlocal interactions and dynamical screening in determining the effective interaction strength of correlated compounds.