Reduced basis emulation of pairing in finite systems

Abstract

In recent years, reduced basis methods (RBMs) have been adapted to the many-body eigenvalue problem and they have been used, largely in nuclear physics, as fast emulators able to bypass expensive direct computations while still providing highly accurate results. This work is meant to show that the RBM is an efficient and accurate emulator for the strong correlations induced by the pairing interaction in a variety of finite systems like ultrasmall superconducting grains, interacting topological superfluids and mesoscopic hybrid superconductor-semiconductor devices, all of which require an expensive, beyond-mean-field, particle-number conserving description. These systems are modelled by the number-conserving Richardson pairing Hamiltonian and its appropriate generalizations. Their ground state is solved for exactly using the Density Matrix Renormalization Group. The reduced basis is assembled iteratively from a small number of exact ground state vectors, well-chosen from across the relevant parameter space using a fast estimate of the emulation error and a greedy local optimization algorithm. The reduced basis emulation is found to accurately describe the weak-to-strong pairing cross-over in small grains, the third-order topological phase transition of the interacting Richardson-Kitaev chain, and the complex charge stability diagram of a hybrid quantum dot - superconductor device. RBMs are thus confirmed to be cheap and accurate emulators for the widely encountered superconducting phenomena. Capable of providing orders of magnitude computational speed-up with respect to approaches based only on traditional many-body solvers, they open new possibilities in building and solving models of interacting many-body systems and in better interfacing them with experimental design and data analysis.