Functional renormalization group for Luttinger liquids with impurities

TL;DR

This paper advances the functional renormalization group method for Luttinger liquids with impurities by including interaction renormalization, enabling accurate analysis of spectral properties and density oscillations in very large systems.

Contribution

It introduces a new fRG approach that incorporates two-particle interaction renormalization, improving accuracy for large systems and intermediate interactions.

Findings

Accurately captures asymptotic power-laws at low energy and long distance.

Provides detailed insights into crossover phenomena at intermediate scales.

Achieves high accuracy compared to DMRG results for large systems.

Abstract

We improve the recently developed functional renormalization group (fRG) for impurities and boundaries in Luttinger liquids by including renormalization of the two-particle interaction, in addition to renormalization of the impurity potential. Explicit flow-equations are derived for spinless lattice fermions with nearest neighbor interaction at zero temperature, and a fast algorithm for solving these equations for very large systems is presented. We compute spectral properties of single-particle excitations, and the oscillations in the density profile induced by impurities or boundaries for chains with up to 1000000 lattice sites. The expected asymptotic power-laws at low energy or long distance are fully captured by the fRG. Results on the relevant energy scales and crossover phenomena at intermediate scales are also obtained. A comparison with numerical density matrix renormalization results for systems with up to 1000 sites shows that the fRG with the inclusion of vertex renormalization is remarkably accurate even for intermediate interaction strengths.