Employing an infinite hierarchy of equations for the Green functions of a many particle system in its ground state mod psi N ), the well known non-relativistic, time-dependent, ground-state perturbation theory of a normal system of interacting fermions is derived, without introducing the hypothesis that mod psi N ) is the adiabatic transform of a non-interacting state. This new formulation of the problem allows us to renormalise conventional perturbation theory by introducing an effective interaction Gamma and the final result is a highly summed and manifestly self-consistent perturbation expansion in powers of Gamma . The authors calculate Gamma to second order and demonstrate that many of the well known results of time-dependent perturbation theory may be obtained by choosing the simplest approximations for Gamma . The results are readily generalised to finite temperatures and the formalism provides a generalised form of Hartree-Fock theory which may have important applications in many areas of physics.
(by translator) A perturbation theory is developed for normal many-particle systems by expanding the inverse of the advanced and retarded Green functions. Both systems with direct interactions and systems with interactions through a quantum field are considered. For the former, the infinite set of coupled equations is written down and the various methods of decoupling discussed. Systems with weak, hard sphere type, or coulomb interactions are considered and the connections with other methods discussed. For systems with quantum field interactions, the chain of equations involves both fermion and boson Green functions and the first approximation can be much better than in earlier cases. This latter approach seems to be more convenient when collective oscillations are important.
In the quantum field theory with the vacuum being the ground state the Green functions are the vacuum expectation values of the chronological, retarded or advanced products of the field operators (Bjoken & Drell, 1964; Itzykson & Zuber, 1985; Peskin & Schroeder, 1995). They are the generalized functions of the real time variables ti (and also other spatial coordinates). For the application of the Green function technique to the study of the timeindependent phenomena in equilibrium many-body systems at a finite temperature, the Matsubara imaginary time Green functions were introduced and widely used (Abrikosov et al., 1975; Bruuns & Flensberg, 2004; Haken, 1976). They are the mean values over a statistical ensemble at a finite temperature of the chronological products of the imaginary timedependent operators. Both these types of Green functions are inadequate for the application to the study of the time-dependent phenomena in the many-body systems with a finite density and at a finite temperature, in particular the non-equilibrium systems. For the application to the study of the time-dependent dynamical processes in non-equilibrium many-body systems Keldysh (Keldysh, 1965) has introduced a more general class of timedependent Green functions at finite temperature and density. They are the mean values of the time-ordered products of quantum operators in the Heisenberg picture over statistical ensembles of many-body systems with finite densities and at finite temperatures (which may be non-vanishing). The simplest example is the two-point Green function
This chapter considers a general form of the Wick’s theorem, which leads to a perturbation expansion of the (contour) single- and two-particle Green’s functions, which are expressed in terms of the contour time-ordering operator. The strategy for proving the Wick’s theorem is similar to that adopted within the Matsubara formalism for the Green’s functions at finite temperature and relies on the Gibbs form of the statistical operator in the interaction picture. An extension to superfluid Bose and Fermi systems is also considered.
The ground-state energy and low-energy excitations of single-particle character of an infinite medium of fermions are discussed with the aid of time-dependent Green's functions, which are convenient generalizations of the exact particle correlation functions in the ground state of
N particles. The power series development for the one- and two-particle functions, under the restriction to two-body forces, is derived and described by means of Feynman diagrams. The derivation of the linked-cluster expansion for the energy then follows immediately. The equivalence to previous versions is established. The one-particle function is examined in particular detail, and it is shown that the poles of its space-time Fourier transform studied as a function of the energy variable, for fixed momentum, determined the (
N+1)-particle and ($N\ensuremath{-}1$)-particle excited states which have single-particle character. For a reasonable assumption about the full spectrum of excited states, it is found that for the interacting system, single-particle excitations with a real energy occur only at the Fermi momentum. It is pointed out that the corresponding energy, termed the perturbed Fermi energy, equals the binding energy per particle in the ground state of
N particles for a saturating system at equilibrium density.It is shown, finally, that the entire structure of the theory may be carried over to the case of finite temperature, requiring only a redefinition of the Green's functions. The analogy is constructed from a discussion of the internal energy.