We study atoms trapped with a harmonic confinement in an optical lattice characterized by a flat band and Dirac cones. We show that such an optical lattice can be constructed which can be accurately described with the tight binding or Hubbard models. In the case of fermions the release of the harmonic confinement removes fast atoms occupying the Dirac cones while those occupying the flat band remain immobile. Using exact diagonalization and dynamics we demonstrate that a similar strong occupation of the flat band does not happen in bosonic case and furthermore that the mean field model is not capable for describing the dynamics of the boson cloud.

The difference between boson and fermion dynamics in quasi-one-dimensional lattices is studied by calculating the persistent current in small quantum rings and by exact simulations of the timeevolution of the many-particle state in two cases: Expansion of a localized cloud, and collisions in a Newtons cradle. We consider three different lattices which in the tight binding model exhibit flat bands. The physical realization is considered to be an optical lattice with bosonic or fermionic atoms. The atoms are assumed to interact with a repulsive short range interaction. The different statistics of bosons and fermions lead to different dynamics. Spinless fermions are easily trapped in the flat-band states due to the Pauli exclusion principle, which prevents them from interacting, while bosons are able to push each other out from the flat-band states.

In non-equilibrium many-body perturbation theory, Langreth rules are an efficient way to extract real-time equations from contour ones. However, the standard rules are not applicable in cases that do not reduce to simple convolutions and multiplications. We introduce a procedure for extracting real-time equations from general multi-argument contour functions with an arbitrary number of arguments. This is done for both the standard Keldysh contour, as well as the extended contour with a vertical track that allows for general initial states. This amounts to the generalization of the standard Langreth rules to much more general situations. These rules involve multi-argument retarded functions as key ingredients, for which we derive intuitive graphical rules. We apply our diagrammatic recipe to derive Langreth rules for the so-called double triangle structure and the general vertex function, relevant for the study of vertex corrections beyond the GW approximation.

Recently, a method was presented for constructing self-energies within manybody perturbation theory that is guaranteed to produce a positive spectral function for equilibrium systems, by representing the self-energy as a product of half-diagrams on the forward and backward branches of the Keldysh contour [Phys. Rev. B 2014, 90, 115134]. An alternative half-diagram representation that is based on products of retarded diagrams is derived here. This approach extends the method to systems out of equilibrium. When a steady-state limit exists, it is shown that our approach yields a positive definite spectral function in the frequency domain.

For a given diagrammatic approximation in many-body perturbation theory it is not guaranteed that positive observables, such as the density or the spectral function, retain their positivity. For zero-temperature systems we developed a method [Phys.Rev.B{\bf 90},115134 (2014)] based on so-called cutting rules for Feynman diagrams that enforces these properties diagrammatically, thus solving the problem of negative spectral densities observed for various vertex approximations. In this work we extend this method to systems at finite temperature by formulating the cutting rules in terms of retarded $N$-point functions, thereby simplifying earlier approaches and simultaneously solving the issue of non-vanishing vacuum diagrams that has plagued finite temperature expansions. Our approach is moreover valid for nonequilibrium systems in initial equilibrium and allows us to show that important commonly used approximations, namely the $GW$, second Born and $T$-matrix approximation, retain positive spectral functions at finite temperature. Finally we derive an analytic continuation relation between the spectral forms of retarded $N$-point functions and their Matsubara counterparts and a set of Feynman rules to evaluate them.