In the equation of motion approach to the two-time Green's functions, conventional Tyablikov-type truncation of the chain of equations is rather arbitrary and apt to violate the analytical structure of Green's functions. Here, we propose a practical way to truncate the equations of motion using operator projection. The partial projection approximation is introduced to evaluate the Liouville matrix. It guarantees the causality of Green's functions, fulfills the time translation invariance and the particle-hole symmetry, and is easy to implement in a computer. To benchmark this method, we study the Anderson impurity model using the operator basis at the level of Lacroix approximation. Improvement over conventional Lacroix approximation is observed. The distribution of Kondo screening in the energy space is studied using this method.
A BBGKY-like hierarchy is derived from the non-equilibrium Redfield equation. Two further approximations are introduced and each can be used to truncate and solve the hierarchy. In the first approximation such a truncation is performed by replacing two-particle Green's functions (GFs) in the hierarchy by their values at equilibrium. The second method is developed based on the cluster expansion, which constructs two-particle GFs from one-particle GFs and neglects the correlation part. A non-equilibrium Wick's Theorem is proved to provide a basis for this non-equilibrium cluster expansion. Using those two approximations, our method of solving the Redfield equation, for instance, of an N-site chain of interacting spinless fermions, involves an eigenvalue problem with dimension
2N and a linear system with dimension
N2 in the first case, and a nonlinear equation with dimension
N2 in the second case, which can be solved iteratively via a sequence of
N2 linear systems. Other currently available direct methods correspond to a linear system or an eigenvalue system with dimension
4N plus an eigenvalue system with dimension
2N. As a test of the methods, for small systems with size N=4, results are found to be consistent with results made available by other direct methods. Although not discussed here, extending both methods to their next levels is straightforward. This indicates a promising potential for this BBGKY-like approach of non-equilibrium kinetic equations.