Hybrid Hamiltonian-diagrammatic quantum impurity solver

Abstract

Quantum impurity models, which describe the coupling between interacting orbitals and a non-interacting bath, play a central role in the physics of strongly correlated electron systems. Solving a quantum impurity model in general requires the use of non-perturbative numerical methods. Hamiltonian-based approaches, which rely on an explicit bath discretization, are typically limited to a small number of bath sites or small entanglement, and diagrammatic methods suffer from sign problems, slow convergence, or diagram truncation approximations. Here we show that these two classes of methods can be combined: augmenting diagrammatic methods with a small auxiliary bath can reduce the residual problem to a regime where low-order perturbation theory is highly accurate and rapidly converging. In a simple benchmark, the precision of the hybrid approach surpasses bold-line calculations by several orders of magnitude; for a strongly interacting two-orbital model with a severe sign problem, convergence is achieved at three orders of magnitude lower computational cost than competing methods; and convergence to the unknown exact result is rapidly accelerated in a difficult realistic problem. Our results establish a practical route to high-precision quantum impurity solutions in correlated quantum systems.