The Anderson impurity model out-of-equilibrium: Assessing the accuracy of simulation techniques with an exact...

We study the interacting, symmetrically coupled single impurity Anderson model. By employing the nonequilibrium Green's function formalism, we reach an exact relationship between the steady-state charge current flowing through the impurity (dot) and its occupation. We argue that the steady-state current-occupation relation can be used to assess the consistency of simulation techniques and identify spurious transport phenomena. We test this relation in two different model variants: First, we study the Anderson-Holstein model in the strong electron-vibration coupling limit using the polaronic quantum master equation method. We find that the current-occupation relation is violated numerically in standard calculations, with simulations bringing up incorrect transport effects. Using a numerical procedure, we resolve the problem efficiently. Second, we simulate the Anderson model with electron-electron interaction on the dot using a deterministic numerically exact time-evolution scheme. Here, we observe that the current-occupation relation is satisfied in the steady-state limit-even before results converge to the exact limit.