On the applicability of an equation of motion method at low-temperatures: comments on cond-mat/0309458 and cond-mat/0308413

Abstract

The equation of motion method (EOM) is one of the approximations to calculate transport coefficients of interacting electron systems. The method is known to be useful to examine high-temperature properties. However, sometimes a naive application of the EOM fails to capture an important physics at low-energy scale, and it happens in recent preprints cond-mat/0309458 and cond-mat/0308413 which study a series of quantum dots. These preprints concluded that a unitarity-limit transport due to the Kondo resonance, which has been deduced from a Fermi-liquid behavior of the self-energy at T=0, $ω=0$ [A.O., PRB {\bf 63}, 115305 (2001)], does not occur. We show that the EOM self-energy obtained with a finite cluster has accidentally a singular $1/ω$ dependence around the Fermi energy, and it misleads one to the result incompatible with a Fermi-liquid ground state.