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arXiv:1601.02418 · Modern Physics Letters A

Hartree–Fock and random phase approximation theories in a many-fermion solvable model

Giampaolo Co', Stefano De Leo

Published Oct 13, 2015• 7 citations
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Abstract

We present an ideal system of interacting fermions where the solutions of the many-body Schrödinger equation can be obtained without making approximations. These exact solutions are used to test the validity of two many-body effective approaches, the Hartree–Fock and the random phase approximation theories. The description of the ground state done by the effective theories improves with increasing number of particles.

DOI
10.1142/s0217732315501965

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We present an ideal system of interacting fermions where the solutions of the many-body Schrödinger equation can be obtained without making approximations. These exact solutions are used to test the validity of two many-body effective approaches, the Hartree–Fock and the random phase approximation theories. The description of the ground state done by the effective theories improves with increasing number of particles.
I review results concerning the derivation of effective equations for the dynamics of interacting Fermi gases in a high-density regime of mean-field type. Three levels of effective theories, increasing in precision, can be distinguished: the semiclassical theory given by the Vlasov equation, the mean-field theory given by the Hartree–Fock equation, and the description of the dominant effects of non-trivial entanglement by the random phase approximation. Particular attention is given to the discussion of admissible initial data, and I present an example of a realistic quantum quench that can be approximated by Hartree–Fock dynamics.
A general field-theoretical description of many-fermion systems, both with and without quenched disorder, is developed. Starting from the basic Grassmannian action for interacting fermions, we first bosonize the theory by introducing composite matrix variables that correspond to two-fermion excitations and integrating out the fermion degrees of freedom. The saddle-point solution of the resulting matrix field theory reproduces a disordered Hartree-Fock approximation, and an expansion to Gaussian order about the saddle point corresponds to a disordered random-phase approximation (RPA)-like theory. In the clean limit they reduce to the ordinary Hartree-Fock and random-phase approximations. We first concentrate on disordered systems, and perform a symmetry analysis that allows for a systematic separation of the massless modes from the massive ones. By treating the massive modes in a simple approximation, one obtains a technically satisfactory derivation of the generalized nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ model that has been used in the theory of metal-insulator transitions. The theory also allows for the treatment of other phase transitions in the disordered Fermi liquid. We further use renormalization group techniques to establish the existence of a disordered Fermi-liquid fixed point, and show that it is stable for all dimensions d>2d>2d>2. The so-called weak-localization effects can be understood as corrections to scaling near this fixed point. The general theory also allows for studying the clean limit. For that case we develop a loop expansion that corresponds to an expansion in powers of the screened Coulomb interaction, and that represents a systematic improvement over RPA. We corroborate the existence of a Fermi-liquid fixed point that is stable for all dimensions d>1d>1d>1, in agreement with other recent field-theoretical treatments of clean Fermi liquids.
Quantum many-body systems can be studied theoretically from first principles using microscopic models, but the computational cost of numerically exact calculations increases exponentially with the number of particles and the complexity of the interaction, limiting the systems that can be analysed. The Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) and quasiparticle random phase approximation (QRPA) methods, heavily used in nuclear physics, rely on mean-field approximations but scale more favourably with increasing system size and complexity. In this work we apply these methods to the problem of a two-dimensional harmonically trapped Fermi gas with attractive interactions, with the goal of investigating the validity of the approximations in the few-body limit. We implement the approximate methods in code and then compare them with exact calculations. We find that the HFB method can account for pairing correlations that arise due to the attractive interaction, predicting well the ground state energy even at high interaction strengths. Also, the excitation spectra predicted by the QRPA method qualitatively match the true spectra, reproducing the expected subset of excitations. Finally, we see that perturbative corrections can be used to improve the ground state energy estimate of the HFB.
In this article, we revisit the question of the validity of Hartree-Fock and random-phase approximations. We show that there is a connection between the two and while the RPA as it is known in much of the physics literature is of limited validity, there is a generalised sense in which the random phase approximation is of much wider applicability including to systems that do not possess Fermi surfaces. The main conclusion is that the Hartree-Fock approximation is a mean-field idea applied to the density operator, and the random-phase approximation is a mean-field idea applied to the number operator. The generalised RPA is used to compute single-particle properties such as momentum distribution and spectral functions. It is found that we have to go beyond the generalised RPA and include fluctuations in the momentum distribution in order to recover a nonzero imaginary part of the one-particle self energy, which is also explicitly computed, all this in any number of spatial dimensions and no bosonization is needed.