Non-Hermitian Green’s function theory with N -body interactions: The coupled-cluster similarity transformation
Christopher J. N. Coveney, David P. Tew
We present the diagrammatic theory of the irreducible self-energy and Bethe-Salpeter kernel that naturally arises within the Green’s function formalism for a general N -body non-Hermitian interaction. In this work, we focus specifically on the coupled-cluster (CC) self-energy generated by the similarity transformation of the electronic structure Hamiltonian. The main result of this work is a Green’s function formalism for non-Hermitian many-body quantum systems. We develop the biorthogonal quantum theory to construct dynamical correlation functions where the time dependence of operators is governed by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. We extend the Gell-Mann and Low theorem to include non-Hermitian interactions and to generate perturbative expansions of many-body Green’s functions. We introduce the single-particle coupled-cluster Green’s function and derive the perturbative diagrammatic expansion for the non-Hermitian coupled-cluster self-energy in terms of the “noninteracting” reference Green’s function, Σ ̃ [ G 0 ] . From the exact equation of motion of the single-particle coupled-cluster Green’s function, we derive the self-consistent renormalized coupled-cluster self-energy, Σ ̃ [ G ̃ ] , and demonstrate its relationship to the perturbative expansion of the self-energy, Σ ̃ [ G 0 ] . Subsequently, we show that the usual electronic self-energy can be recovered from the coupled-cluster self-energy by neglecting the effects of the similarity transformation. We show how the coupled-cluster ground-state energy can be obtained from the coupled-cluster self-energy and provide an overview of the relationship between approximations for the coupled-cluster self-energy, ionization potential/electron affinity equation-of-motion coupled-cluster theory, and the G 0 W 0 approximation. As a result, we introduce the CC- G 0 W 0 self-energy by leveraging the connections between Green’s function and coupled-cluster theory. Finally, we derive the diagrammatic expansion of the coupled-cluster Bethe-Salpeter kernel.
arXiv:2503.06586•Physical Review Research•Feb 17, 2026•4 citations