Collective magnetic fluctuations in Hubbard plaquettes captured by fluctuating local field method

Abstract

We establish a way to handle main collective fluctuations in correlated quantum systems based on a fluctuating local field concept. This technique goes beyond standard mean-field approaches, such as Hartree-Fock and dynamical mean-field theories (DMFT), as it includes a fluctuating classical field that acts on the leading order parameter of the system. Effective model parameters of this theory are determined from the variational principle, which allows one to resolve the Fierz ambiguity in decoupling of the local interaction term. In the saddle-point approximation for the fluctuating field our method reproduces the mean-field result. The exact numerical integration over this field allows one to consider nonlinear fluctuations of the global order parameter of the system while local correlations can be accounted for by solving the DMFT impurity problem. We apply our method to the magnetic susceptibility of finite Hubbard systems at half-filling and demonstrate that the introduced technique leads to a superior improvement of results with respect to parental mean-field approaches, without significant numerical complications. We show that the fluctuating local field method can be used in a very broad range of temperatures substantially below the Néel temperature of DMFT, which remains a major challenge for all existing theoretical approaches. © 2020 American Physical Society.