Interleaved numerical renormalization group as an efficient multiband impurity solver

Quantum impurity problems can be solved using the numerical renormalization group (NRG), which involves discretizing the free conduction electron system and mapping to a `Wilson chain'. It was shown recently that Wilson chains for different electronic species can be interleaved by use of a modified discretization, dramatically increasing the numerical efficiency of the RG scheme [Phys. Rev. B 89, 121105(R) (2014)]. Here we systematically examine the accuracy and efficiency of the `interleaved' NRG (iNRG) method in the context of the single impurity Anderson model, the two-channel Kondo model, and a three-channel Anderson-Hund model. The performance of iNRG is explicitly compared with `standard' NRG (sNRG): when the average number of states kept per iteration is the same in both calculations, the accuracy of iNRG is equivalent to that of sNRG but the computational costs are signifficantly lower in iNRG when the same symmetries are exploited. Although iNRG weakly breaks SU(N) channel symmetry (if present), both accuracy and numerical cost are entirely competitive with sNRG exploiting full symmetries. iNRG is therefore shown to be a viable and technically simple alternative to sNRG for high-symmetry models. Moreover, iNRG can be used to solve a range of lower-symmetry multiband problems that are inaccessible to sNRG.