Density Functional Theory for the Hubbard-Holstein model

Sammanfattning: The physics of interacting many-body systems is a very complex and challenging subject. Therefore one in general needs to use simplified models and approximate methods for studying these systems theoretically. In this work we study the exchange-correlation (xc) potential for the Hubbard-Holstein (HH) model for the application of Density Functional Theory (DFT) to the same. The Hohenberg-Kohn theorem and the two sets of Kohn-Sham equations are derived for the HH-model extending a procedure outlined in previous work. The xc-potentials for the fermions and bosons respectively are then derived analytically as functions of the density $n$ and phononic displacement $x$ for a single HH-site in contact with a heat bath, generalizing the procedure for the pure Hubbard model. The potential for the HH-site is found to have a smaller gap at half filling than for the Hubbard model, due to a rescaling of the effective electron-electron interaction. It also has an additional term linear in $(n-1)$. The xc-potentials are used to study two simple systems, an Andersson impurity dimer and a four-site chain of HH-sites. The results are compared to those of an exact solution and to the Hartree-Fock (HF) solution. For the dimer the DFT-method performs consistently better than the HF-method, while the results for the chain are more ambiguous. However, the central result of this thesis is to produce xc-potentials for an infinitely coordinated Bethe lattice, using Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT). The potentials for a small but representative set of interaction parameters are presented and compared to the analytical potential. The potentials are similar in that they do not exhibit much structure, and they behave very similarly far from half filling. Close to half filling they show more differences, as the analytic potential is always discontinuous around half filling while the potential attained via DMFT is only discontinuous for large electron-electron interactions.