Finite-temperature density-matrix renormalization group method for electron-phonon systems: Thermodynamics and Holstein-polaron spectral functions

This work introduces an efficient numerical tool to calculate thermodynamic and spectral properties for electron-phonon problems at finite temperature in one dimension. Combining a finite-temperature density-matrix renormalization group method with local basis optimization allows one to access system sizes out of reach for other wave-function based approaches. The authors demonstrate the method's capabilities by computing several spectral functions of the Holstein polaron problem. The image shows the electron spectral function for two different system sizes (L=21, 101).