Two-particle correlations in a dynamic cluster approximation with continuous momentum dependence: Superconductivity in the two-dimensional Hubbard model
The DCA + algorithm was recently introduced by Stear, Maier, and Schulthess [Phys. Rev. B 88, 115101 (2013), 10.1103/PhysRevB.88.115101] to extend the dynamic cluster approximation (DCA) with a continuous lattice self-energy in order to achieve better convergence with cluster size. In this work, we extend the DCA + algorithm to the calculation of two-particle correlation functions by introducing irreducible vertex functions with continuous momentum dependence consistent with the DCA + self-energy. This enables a significantly more controlled and reliable study of phase transitions than with the DCA. We test the new method by calculating the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ in the attractive Hubbard model and show that it reproduces previous determinantal quantum Monte Carlo results. We then calculate $T_c$ in the doped repulsive Hubbard model, for which previous DCA calculations could only access the weak-coupling ($\textit{U}$ =4$\textit{t}$) regime for large clusters. Here, we show that the new algorithm provides access to much larger clusters and delivers asymptotically converged results for $T_c$ for both the weak ($\textit{U}$ =4$\textit{t}$) and intermediate ($\textit{U}$ =7$\textit{t}$) coupling regimes, and thereby enables the accurate determination of the exact infinite cluster size result.