After determining the eigenstates and energies of a given Hamiltonian, exact diagonalization can be used to obtain expectation values of observables. For example, if is an observable, its thermal expectation value is where is the partition function. If the observable can be written down in the initial basis for the problem, then this sum can be evaluated after transforming to the basis of eigenstates. Green's functions may be evaluated similarly. For example, the retardedGreen's function can be written Exact diagonalization can also be used to determine the time evolution of a system after a quench. Suppose the system has been prepared in an initial state, and then for time evolves under a new Hamiltonian,. The state at time is
Memory requirements
The dimension of the Hilbert space describing a quantum system scales exponentially with system size. For example, consider a system of spins localized on fixed lattice sites. The dimension of the on-site basis is 2, because the state of each spin can be described as a superposition of spin-up and spin-down, denoted and. The full system has dimension, and the Hamiltonian represented as a matrix has size. This implies that computation time and memory requirements scale very unfavorably in exact diagonalization. In practice, the memory requirements can be reduced by taking advantage of symmetry of the problem, imposing conservation laws, working with sparse matrices, or using other techniques.
Comparison with other techniques
Exact diagonalization is useful for extracting exact information about finite systems. However, often small systems are studied to gain insight into infinite lattice systems. If the diagonalized system is too small, its properties will not reflect the properties of the system in the thermodynamic limit, and the simulation is said to suffer from finite size effects. Unlike some other exact theory techniques, such as Auxiliary-field Monte Carlo, exact diagonalization obtains Green's functions directly in real time, as opposed to imaginary time. Unlike in these other techniques, exact diagonalization results do not need to be numerically analytically continued. This is an advantage, because numerical analytic continuation is an ill-posed and difficult optimization problem.
Studying various properties of the 2D Heisenberg model in a magnetic field, including antiferromagnetism and spin-wave velocity.
Studying the Drude weight of the 2D Hubbard model.
Studying out-of-time-order correlations and scrambling in the SYK model.
Implementations
Numerous software packages implementing exact diagonalization of quantum Hamiltonians exist. These include , , , and many others.
Generalizations
Exact diagonalization results from many small clusters can be combined to obtain more accurate information about systems in the thermodynamic limit using the numerical linked cluster expansion.
