Dominik Smith

Monte Carlo simulation of the tight-binding model of graphene with partially screened Coulomb interactions

We report on Hybrid-Monte-Carlo simulations of the tight-binding model with long-range Coulomb interactions for the electronic properties of graphene. We investigate the spontaneous breaking of sublattice symmetry corresponding to a transition from the semimetal to an antiferromagnetic insulating phase. Our short-range interactions thereby include the partial screening due to electrons in higher energy states from ab initio calculations based on the constrained random phase approximation [T.O.Wehling {\it et al.}, Phys.Rev.Lett.{\bf 106}, 236805 (2011)]. In contrast to a similar previous Monte-Carlo study [M.V.Ulybyshev {\it et al.}, Phys.Rev.Lett.{\bf 111}, 056801 (2013)] we also include a phenomenological model which describes the transition to the unscreened bare Coulomb interactions of graphene at half filling in the long-wavelength limit. Our results show, however, that the critical coupling for the antiferromagnetic Mott transition is largely insensitive to the strength of these long-range Coulomb tails. They hence confirm the prediction that suspended graphene remains in the semimetal phase when a realistic static screening of the Coulomb interactions is included.

Effective potential for SU(2) Polyakov loops and Wilson loop eigenvalues

We simulate SU(2) gauge theory at temperatures ranging from slightly below Tc to roughly 2Tc for two different values of the gauge coupling. Using a histogram method, we extract the effective potential for the Polyakov loop and for the phases of the eigenvalues of the thermal Wilson loop, in both the fundamental and adjoint representations. We show that the classical potential of the fundamental loop can be parametrized within a simple model which includes a Vandermonde potential and terms linear and quadratic in the Polyakov loop. We discuss how parametrizations for the other cases can be obtained from this model.

Effective potential for Polyakov loops from a center symmetric effective theory in three dimensions

We present lattice simulations of a center-symmetric dimensionally reduced effective field theory for SU(2) Yang-Mills which employ thermal Wilson lines and three-dimensional magnetic fields as fundamental degrees of freedom. The action is composed of a gauge invariant kinetic term, spatial gauge fields and a potential for the Wilson line which includes a fuzzy bag term to generate nonperturbative fluctuations. The effective potential for the Polyakov loop is extracted from the simulations including all modes of the loop as well as for cooled configurations where the hard modes have been averaged out. The former is found to exhibit a nonanalytic contribution while the latter can be described by a mean field like ansatz with quadratic and quartic terms, plus a Vandermonde potential which depends upon the location within the phase diagram.

Spectrum of QCD at Finite Isospin Density

We study the phase diagram of QCD at finite isospin density using two flavors of staggered quarks. We investigate the low temperature region of the phase diagram where we find a pion condensation phase at high chemical potential. We started a basic analysis of the spectrum at finite isospin density. In particular, we measured pion, rho and nucleon masses inside and outside of the pion condensation phase. In agreement with previous studies in two-color QCD at finite baryon density we find that the Polyakov loop does not depend on the density in the staggered formulation.

Competing order in the fermionic Hubbard model on the hexagonal graphene lattice

We study the phase diagram of the fermionic Hubbard model on the hexagonal lattice in the space of on-site and nearest neighbor couplings with Hybrid-Monte-Carlo simulations. With pure on-site repulsion this allows to determine the critical coupling strength for spin-density wave formation with the standard approach of introducing a small mass term, explicitly breaking the sublattice symmetry. The analogous mass term for charge-density wave formation above a critical nearest-neighbor repulsion, on the other hand, would introduce a fermion sign problem. The competition between the two and the phase diagram in the space of the two coouplings can however be studied in simulations without explicit sublattice symmetry breaking. Our results compare qualitatively well with the Hartree-Fock phase diagram. We furthermore demonstrate how spin-symmetry breaking by the Euclidean time discretization can be avoided also, when using an improved fermion action based on an exponetial transfer matrix with exact sublattice symmetry.

Interelectron interactions and the RKKY potential between H adatoms in graphene

We use first-principles quantum Monte Carlo simulations to study the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction between hydrogen adatoms attached to a graphene sheet. We find that the pairwise RKKY interactions at distances of a few lattice spacings are strongly affected by interelectron interactions, in particular, the potential barrier between widely separated adatoms and the dimer configuration becomes wider and thus harder to penetrate. We also point out that antiferrromagnetic and charge density wave orderings have very different effects on the RKKY interaction. Finally, we analyze the stability of several regular adatom superlattices with respect to small displacements of a single adatom, distinguishing the cases of adatoms which populate either both or only one sublattice of the graphene lattice.

Thermodynamics of the O(3) model in 1+1 dimensions: lattice vs. analytical results

A bstractA detailed study of the thermodynamics of the O(N = 3) model in 1+1 dimensions is presented, employing a two-particle-irreducible resummation prescription as well as fully nonperturbative finite-temperature lattice simulations. The analytical results are computed using the Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis (CJT) formalism and the auxiliary field method to one- and to two-loop order. The lattice results are obtained through Monte Carlo simulation for various lattice spacings. The analytical and lattice results for pressure, trace anomaly, and energy density, resembling closely those of four-dimensional Yang-Mills theories, are compared with each other. We find that to one-loop order there is a good correspondence between the CJT formalism and the lattice study for low temperatures. However, at high T the two-loop calculation fares better, correcting for the overestimation from the former approximation.

Two-colour QCD at finite density with two flavours of staggered quarks

In this contribution we revisit simulations of two-color QCD with rooted staggered quarks at finite density, where baryon-number spontaneously breaks and a diquark condensate forms. We thereby pay special attention to simulating outside the lattice-artifact bulk phase, in which

Hybrid Monte Carlo study of monolayer graphene with partially screened Coulomb interactions at finite spin density

Z_2

Chiral restoration and deconfinement in two-color QCD with two flavors of staggered quarks

monopoles condense, and investigate some of the consequences of this, e.g. on the chiral and the diquark condensate which were known to be well described by chiral effective field theory. Not surprisingly, on finer lattices outside the bulk phase the quark condensate now requires additive renormalization before it can be compared with effective field theory predictions. The subtraction must necessarily depend on the chemical potential, however. The diquark condensate is not affected by this problem and remains in good agreement with these predictions. We also compare staggered with Wilson quarks to demonstrate that the two fermion discretizations yield qualitatively different results well below half-filling already. We close with prelimiary results for the Goldstone spectrum to demonstrate that the continuum pattern is recovered also with staggered quarks outside the bulk phase.