Method for reconstructing the self-energy from the spectral function

Abstract

A fundamental question about the nature of quantum materials such as High-T$_c$ systems remain open to date -- it is unclear whether they are (some variety of) Fermi liquids, or (some variety of) non Fermi liquids. A direct avenue to determine their nature is to study the (imaginary part of the) self-energy at low energies. Here we present a novel method to extract this low $\omega$ self-energy from experimentally derived spectral functions. The method seems suited for implementation with high quality angle resolved photoemission data. It is based on a helpful Theorem proposed here, which assures us that the method has minimal (or vanishing) error at the lowest energies. We provide numerical examples showing that a few popular model systems yield distinguishably different low energy self-energies.