In many-body physics, the problem of analytic continuation is that of numerically extracting the spectral density of a Green function given its values on the imaginary axis. It is a necessary post-processing step for calculating dynamical properties of physical systems from Quantum Monte Carlo simulations, which often compute Green function values only at imaginary times or Matsubara frequencies.
Mathematically, the problem reduces to solving a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind with an ill-conditioned kernel. As a result, it is an ill-posed inverse problem with no unique solution and where a small noise on the input leads to large errors in the unregularized solution. There are different methods for solving this problem including the maximum entropy method, the average spectrum method and Pade approximation methods.
Examples
A common analytic continuation problem is obtaining the spectral function at real frequencies from the Green function values at Matsubara frequencies by numerically inverting the integral equation
where for fermionic systems or for bosonic ones and is the inverse temperature. This relation is an example of Kramers-Kronig relation.
The spectral function can also be related to the imaginary-time Green function be applying the inverse Fourier transform to the above equation
with . Evaluating the summation over Matsubara frequencies gives the desired relation
where the upper sign is for fermionic systems and the lower sign is for bosonic ones.
Another example of the analytic continuation is calculating the optical conductivity from the current-current correlation function values at Matsubara frequencies. The two are related as following
Software
- The Maxent Project: Open source utility for performing analytic continuation using the maximum entropy method.
- Spektra: Free online tool for performing analytic continuation using the average spectrum Method.
- SpM: Sparse modeling tool for analytic continuation of imaginary-time Green’s function.
See also
- Analytic continuation
- Analytic continuation along a curve
- Fredholm integral equation
- Green's function
- Kramers–Kronig relations
- Quantum Monte Carlo
References
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- Ghanem, Khaldoon; Koch, Erik (2020-02-10). "Average spectrum method for analytic continuation: Efficient blocked-mode sampling and dependence on the discretization grid". Physical Review B. 101 (8): 085111. arXiv:1912.01379. Bibcode:2020PhRvB.101h5111G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.101.085111. S2CID 208548627.
- Ghanem, Khaldoon; Koch, Erik (2020-07-06). "Extending the average spectrum method: Grid point sampling and density averaging". Physical Review B. 102 (3): 035114. arXiv:2004.01155. Bibcode:2020PhRvB.102c5114G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.102.035114. S2CID 214775183.
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- Östlin, A.; Chioncel, L.; Vitos, L. (2012-12-06). "One-particle spectral function and analytic continuation for many-body implementation in the exact muffin-tin orbitals method". Physical Review B. 86 (23): 235107. arXiv:1209.5283. Bibcode:2012PhRvB..86w5107O. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.86.235107. S2CID 8434964.