Resolving space-time structures of quantum impurities with a numerically exact few-body algorithm

Abstract

We introduce a numerically exact real-time evolution scheme for quantum impurities in a macroscopically large bath. The algorithm is few-body revealing, namely it identifies the electronic orbitals that can be made inactive (in a trivial product state) by a time-dependent orbital rotation. Following a quench, we show that both the number of active orbitals and their associated matrix product state bond dimensions saturate to small values, leading to an algorithm dramatically more accurate and faster than the state of the art. We are thus able to follow the dynamics for thousands of fermions, up to the long-time stationary regime, and to study subtle aspects of quantum relaxation in the spatio-temporal domain, such as the emergence of entanglement structures in the Kondo screening cloud.