https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2011-20880-7
Regular Article
Wilson chains are not thermal reservoirs
Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of
Cologne, 50937
Cologne,
Germany
a e-mail: rosch@thp.uni-koeln.de
Received:
29
October
2011
Received in final form:
4
November
2011
Published online:
11
January
2012
Wilson chains, based on a logarithmic discretization of a continuous spectrum, are widely used to model an electronic (or bosonic) bath for Kondo spins and other quantum impurities within the numerical renormalization group method and other numerical approaches. In this short note we point out that Wilson chains can not serve as thermal reservoirs as their temperature changes by a number of order ΔE when a finite amount of energy ΔE is added. This proves that for a large class of non-equilibrium problems they cannot be used to predict the long-time behavior.
Key words: Computational Methods
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag, 2012
