Recently, Han and Heary [Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 236808 (2007)] proposed an approach to steady-state quantum transport through mesoscopic structures, which maps the nonequilibrium problem onto a family of auxiliary quantum impurity systems subject to imaginary voltages. We employ continuous-time quantum Monte-Carlo solvers to calculate accurate imaginary time data for the auxiliary models. The spectral function is obtained from a maximum entropy analytical continuation in both Matsubara frequency and complexified voltage. To enable the analytical continuation we construct a kernel which is compatible with the analytical structure of the theory. While it remains a formidable task to extract reliable spectral functions from this unbiased procedure, particularly for large voltages, our results indicate that the method in principle yields results in agreement with those obtained by other methods.

We discuss the formal relationship between the real-time Keldysh and imaginary-time theory for nonequilibrium in quantum dot systems. The latter can be reformulated using the recently proposed Matsubara voltage approach. We establish general conditions for correct analytic continuation procedure on physical observables, and apply the technique to the calculation of static quantities in steady-state non-equilibrium for a quantum dot subject to a finite bias voltage and external magnetic field. Limitations of the Matsubara voltage approach are also pointed out.

We investigate the possibility to assist the numerically ill-posed calculation of spectral properties of interacting quantum systems in thermal equilibrium by extending the imaginary-time simulation to a finite SchwingerKeldysh contour. The effect of this extension is tested within the standard maximum entropy approach to analytic continuation. We find that the inclusion of real-time data improves the resolution of structures at high energy, while the imaginary-time data are needed to correctly reproduce low-frequency features such as quasiparticle peaks. As a nonequilibrium application, we consider the calculation of time-dependent spectral functions from retarded Green function data on a finite time interval, and compare the maximum entropy approach to direct Fourier transformation and a method based on Padé approximants.

-We use different numerical approaches to calculate the double occupancy and magnetic susceptibility as a function of a bias voltage in an Anderson impurity model. Specifically, we compare results from the Matsubara-voltage quantum Monte-Carlo approach (MV-QMC), the scattering-states numerical renormalization group (SNRG), and real-time quantum Monte-Carlo (RT-QMC), covering Coulomb repulsions ranging from the weak-coupling well into the strongcoupling regime. We observe a distinctly different behavior of the double occupancy and the magnetic response. The former measures charge fluctuations and thus only indirectly exhibits the Kondo scale, while the latter exhibits structures on the scale of the equilibrium Kondo temperature. The Matsubara-voltage approach and the scattering-states numerical renormalization group yield consistent values for the magnetic susceptibility in the Kondo limit. On the other hand, all three numerical methods produce different results for the behavior of charge fluctuations in strongly interacting dots out of equilibrium.