Generalized Spectral Decomposition for Quantum Impurity Problems

Abstract: Solving quantum impurity problems may advance our understanding of strongly correlated electron physics, but its development in multi-impurity systems has been greatly hindered due to the presence of shared bath. Here, we propose a general operation strategy to disentangle the shared bath into multiple auxiliary baths and relate the problem to a spectral decomposition problem of function matrix for applying the numerical renormalization group (NRG). We prove exactly that such decomposition is possible for models satisfying (block) circulant symmetry, and show how to construct the auxiliary baths for arbitrary impurity configuration by mapping its graph structure to the subgraph of a regular impurity configuration. We further propose an approximate decomposition algorithm to reduce the number of auxiliary baths and save the computational workload. Our work reveals a deep connection between quantum impurity problems and the graph theory, and provides a general scheme to extend the NRG applications for realistic multi-impurity systems.