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International Journal of Quantum Chemistry

The role of model systems in the few‐body reduction of the N‐fermion problem

Jerome K. Percus

Published Jan 1, 1978• 147 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract The problem of upper and lower ground state energy bounds for many‐fermion systems is considered from the viewpoint of reduced density matrices. Model density matrices are used for upper bounds to, first uncoupled, then coupled fermions. Model Hamiltonians are developed for lower bounds in corresponding fashion. Both mathematical and physical models are constructed for setting up universally valid inequalities on density matrices. These are joined by both inequalities and equalities in which the explicit form of the system at hand is used. A few illustrative examples are presented.

DOI
10.1002/qua.560130108

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Abstract The problem of upper and lower ground state energy bounds for many‐fermion systems is considered from the viewpoint of reduced density matrices. Model density matrices are used for upper bounds to, first uncoupled, then coupled fermions. Model Hamiltonians are developed for lower bounds in corresponding fashion. Both mathematical and physical models are constructed for setting up universally valid inequalities on density matrices. These are joined by both inequalities and equalities in which the explicit form of the system at hand is used. A few illustrative examples are presented.
Variation principles for obtaining lower bounds by means of density matrices are applied to a number of many-body problems. This is done by means of restrictions derived from the study of exacly solvable models. Two classes of problems are considered: (a) obtaining a lower bound to the ground-state energy of a system of particles, and (b) obtaining a lower bound to the Helmholtz free energy. For the first case an exact lower bound is obtained for the ground-state energy of the particle-conserving Bogoliubov Hamiltonian. Of particular significance in the nonzero temperature case is a rigorous lower bound to the free energy of the Ising model with small external field at low temperatures.
Variational principles for lower bounds to the energy, or free energy for T > 0°, of many-body systems are obtained in a form requiring density matrix minimization subject to certain model restrictions. The latter restrict the domain in which the density matrices can vary, and only utilize the energy—or free energy—for the model Hamiltonian HM. Increasingly accurate bounds are obtained as the model system begins to resemble the system of interest, and the behavior of the error as H − HM approaches zero is shown by two examples based upon the Ising model. Coupling the lower bound principle for the free energy with the standard Gibbs-Bogoliubov upper bound principle results in bounds on generalized susceptibility as well.
The expectation value of the Hamiltonian H for a many-electron system may be expressed in terms of the reduced second-order density matrix and the “reduced” Hamiltonian K for a two-electron system. It may be shown that the antisymmetric component HAS of the original Hamiltonian is an “outer projection” of K with respect to the antisymmetrizer O, so that HAS = OKO. This result implies that the eigenvalues of K are, in order, lower bounds to the eigenvalues of HAS, i.e. to the eigenvalues of H associated with the antisymmetry requirement. The expectation values of K are hence often below the ground state energy of H, and the eigenvalues may be used for the calculation of lower bounds. Some numerical applications to atoms serve as an illustration, and it is shown that the lower bounds become worse as the number of electrons increases. The implications for the “representability problem” are discussed.
Lower bound energy formulae for the N-fermion problem of the type used by Hall (1967) and Post (1956) are considered in terms of a reduced density operator for the interparticle separation. In bounds of this type the N-body energy is bounded below by a sum of eigen-energies of states of relative motion weighted by occupations for the relative states. It is shown that the wavefunctions of relative motion are subject to constraints and in particular must be zero when the particle separation is zero. This modifies the energy spectrum of the reduced Hamiltonian of relative motion and improves the lower bound due to Hall. The improvement is demonstrated for some simple model problems. Furthermore it is shown that the bounds of this type currently known do not exhibit saturation regardless of the interaction details. This leads to some speculation on improved lower bounds.
A variational upper bound on the ground state energy E gs of a quantum system, E gs ⩽ 〈Ψ| H |Ψ〉, is well-known (here H is the Hamiltonian of the system and Ψ is an arbitrary wave function). Much less known are variational lower bounds on the ground state. We consider one such bound which is valid for a many-body translation-invariant lattice system. Such a lattice can be divided into clusters which are identical up to translations. The Hamiltonian of such a system can be written as , where a term H i is supported on the i 'th cluster. The bound reads , where is some wisely chosen set of reduced density matrices of a single cluster. The implementation of this latter variational principle can be hampered by the difficulty of parameterizing the set , which is a necessary prerequisite for a variational procedure. The root cause of this difficulty is the nonlinear positivity constraint ρ > 0 which is to be satisfied by a density matrix. The squaring parametrization of the density matrix, ρ = τ 2 /tr τ 2 , where τ is an arbitrary (not necessarily positive) Hermitian operator, accounts for positivity automatically. We discuss how the squaring parametrization can be utilized to find variational lower bounds on ground states of translation-invariant many-body systems. As an example, we consider a one-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet.