Spectroscopy and complex-time correlations using minimally entangled typical thermal states

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical tensor network approach using minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS) to compute finite-temperature dynamical correlators, including complex-time extensions, for larger quantum systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method combining METTS with complex-time correlation evaluation and analytic continuation techniques to improve finite-temperature dynamical calculations.

Findings

Successfully applied to the Shastry-Sutherland model

Enhanced ability to study larger system sizes at finite temperature

Demonstrated effectiveness of complex-time and analytic continuation methods

Abstract

Tensor network states have enjoyed great success at capturing aspects of strong correlation physics. However, obtaining dynamical correlators at non-zero temperatures is generically hard even using these methods. Here, we introduce a practical approach to computing such correlators using minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS). While our primary method directly computes dynamical correlators of physical operators in real time, we propose extensions where correlations are evaluated in the complex-time plane. The imaginary time component bounds the rate of entanglement growth and strongly alleviates the computational difficulty allowing the study of larger system sizes. To extract the physical correlator one must take the limit of purely real-time evolution. We present two routes to obtaining this information (i) via an analytic correlation function in complex time combined with a stochastic analytic continuation method to obtain the real-time limit and (ii) a hermitian correlation function that asymptotically captures the desired correlation function quantitatively without requiring effort of numerical analytic continuation. We show that these numerical techniques capture the finite-temperature dynamics of the Shastry-Sutherland model - a model of interacting spin one-half in two dimensions.