Dynamical correlation functions from complex time evolution

Abstract

We present an approach to tame the growth of entanglement during time evolution by tensor network methods. It combines time evolution in the complex plane with a perturbative and controlled reconstruction of correlation functions on the real-time axis. We benchmark our approach on the single impurity Anderson model. Compared to purely real-time evolution, the complex time evolution significantly reduces the required bond dimension to obtain the spectral function. Notably, our approach yields self-energy results with high precision at low frequencies, comparable to numerical renormalization group (NRG) results, and it successfully captures the exponentially small Kondo energy scale.