Rigorous Wilsonian Renormalization Group for impurity models with a spectral gap

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel numerical RG method for impurity models with spectral gaps, revealing shared behaviors between superconducting and scalar gapped AIMs and confirming in-gap state phenomena.

Contribution

It develops the log-gap numerical RG, enabling unbiased analysis of gapped impurity models and establishing their RG equivalence class with new insights into in-gap states.

Findings

Shared double scaling in superconducting and scalar gapped AIMs

RG equivalence class with common quantum phase transitions

Confirmation of in-gap states escaping into the continuum

Abstract

The Anderson impurity model (AIM) has long served as a cornerstone in the study of correlated electron systems. While numerical renormalization group (RG) offers great flexibility for metallic reservoirs, it becomes impossible in an unbiased way when a spectral gap $\Delta$ opens up in the tunneling density of states. The only known exception is provided by the superconducting bath. In this paper, we lift these limitations by a novel numerical RG procedure that employs a discretization of the gapped tunneling densities of states into patches which accumulate at the gap edges. This reveals an unusual double scaling which is a shared behavior by the superconducting and the scalar gapped AIMs. Moreover, it requires a special iterative diagonalization procedure with an alternating scheme for discarding states only every second iteration. The discretization and the diagonalization scheme form together, what we refer to as, the log-gap numerical RG. It is successfully applied to the superconducting and to the scalar gapped AIM. Consequently, it reveals that both models belong to the same RG equivalence class which manifests physically in common singlet-doublet quantum phase transitions accompanied by in-gap bound states of given parities. While superconducting AIM is mainly used for benchmarking of the log-gap numerical RG, we also rigorously confirm the phenomenon of in-gap states escaping into the continuum, which was recently indirectly considered in Ref. [1]. The gapped AIM is then tackled in a first ever exact numerical RG approach and confirms quantitatively assertions based on models with auxiliary metallic leads [2-5]. Moreover, it reveals that calculations performed in Refs. [6-8] are of strictly approximate nature.