Efficient pseudomode representation and complexity of quantum impurity models

Out-of-equilibrium fermionic quantum impurity models (QIM), describing a small interacting system coupled to a continuous fermionic bath, play an important role in condensed matter physics. Solving such models is a computationally demanding task, and a variety of computational approaches are based on finding approximate representations of the bath by a finite number of modes. In this paper, we formulate the problem of finding efficient bath representations as that of approximating a kernel of the bath’s Feynman-Vernon influence functional by a sum of complex exponentials, with each term defining a fermionic pseudomode. Under mild assumptions on the analytic properties of the bath spectral density, we provide an analytic construction of pseudomodes, and prove that their number scales polylogarithmically with the maximum evolution time T and the approximation error ε. We then demonstrate that the number of pseudomodes can be significantly reduced by an interpolative matrix decomposition (ID). Furthermore, we present a complementary approach, based on constructing rational approximations of the bath’s spectral density using the “AAA” algorithm, followed by compression with ID. The combination of two approaches yields a pseudomode count scaling as NID ∼ ln(T ) ln(1/ε), and the agreement between the two approaches suggests that the result is close to optimal. Finally, to relate our findings to QIM, we derive an explicit Liouvillian that describes the time evolution of the combined impurity-pseudomodes system. These results establish bounds on the computational resources required for solving out-of-equilibrium QIMs, providing an efficient starting point for tensor-network methods for QIMs.