Funktionale Renormierungsgruppe für Nichtgleichgewichtsphänomene in Vielteilchensysteme

Abstract

The aim of this work is the extension of the functional renormalization group (FRG) formalism to treat non-equilibrium situations. To this end, we reformulate the FRG equations in terms of the Keldysh method which is the standard technique to treat systems out of equilibrium. As simplest non-trivial application to test the potential and weakness of the non-equilibrium FRG we choose the single impurity Anderson model (SIAM). This model represents the paradigm for correlation effects in condensed matter physics and it is at the heart of a large range of experimental and theoretical investigations. In particular, the SIAM can be considered as the standard model for describing the physical properties of certain nanostructures and mesoscopic systems, such as quantum dots. These devices are interesting because they show fancy physical effects such as single electron tunneling and they could open new perspectives for future generations of electronic devices. After a general introduction to mesoscopic systems and the basics of the Keldysh technique, we derive the FRG equations for treating non-equilibrium situations and we point out the differences between equilibrium and non-equilibrium FRG schemes. The FRG can be adopted to describe both fermionic and bosonic systems and, at least formally, time-dependent situations as well as the stationary case. In the second part of this work we analyze the transport properties of quantum dots in several physical situations. First, we study the ""easiest"" case, namely we apply the non-equilibrium FRG formalism to the SIAM with finite bias voltage V_B in the stationary state at T=0. Here, we can test the technique by comparing it to available exact results for the linear response regime V_B = 0. As next step we switch on an external magnetic field B and the temperature T in order to observe the effect of these two parameters on the transport properties of a quantum dot. The comparison to known results for V_B = 0 allows us to critically survey the range of applicability of the Non-equilibrium FRG and the accuracy of the results.