Exploring excited eigenstates of many-body systems using the functional renormalization group

Abstract

We introduce approximate, functional renormalization group based schemes to obtain correlation functions in pure excited eigenstates of large fermionic many-body systems at arbitrary energies. The algorithms are thouroughly benchmarked and their strengths and shortcomings are documented using a one-dimensional interacting tight-binding chain as a prototypical testbed. We study two `toy applications' from the world of Luttinger liquid physics: the survival of power laws in lowly-excited states as well as the spectral function of high-energy `block' excitations which feature several single-particle Fermi edges.