The variational scheme of Gutzwiller has been reexamined so as to apply it to the case of degenerate narrow bands. The ground-state wave function for electrons is investigated for an arbitrary density of electrons and an arbitrary strength of interaction. The typical features of a metal, particularly the Fermi surface, are preserved in this approach as opposed to some other methods. The Coulomb repulsion among electrons scatters the electrons from below to above the Fermi surface of uncorrelated bands. Under the assumption that only the intra-atomic Coulomb interaction is important, the probability of electrons being scattered is larger for the paramagnetic state than for the ferromagnetic state. Therefore the ferromagnetic ground state is favored if the density of states is large at the band edges. The degenerate-band-model Hamiltonian is spin dependent, hence the results obtained from it do not have to obey the theorem of Lieb and Mattis.
Ground-state properties, such as energies and double occupancies, of a one-dimensional two-band Hubbard model are calculated using a first-principles Gutzwiller conjugate gradient minimization theory. The favorable agreement with the results from the density matrix renormalization group theory demonstrates the accuracy of our method. A rotationally invariant approach is further incorporated into the method to greatly reduce the computational complexity with a speedup of approximately 50 times. Moreover, we investigate the Mott transition between a metal and a Mott insulator by evaluating the charge gap. With greatly reduced computational effort, our method reproduces the phase diagram in reasonable agreement with the density matrix renormalization group theory.
Matrix product states (MPS) and ``dressed'' ground states of quadratic mean fields (e.g., Gutzwiller projected Slater determinants) are both important classes of variational wave functions. This latter class has played important roles in understanding superconductivity and quantum spin liquids. We present a method to obtain both the finite and infinite MPS (iMPS) representation of the ground state of an arbitrary fermionic quadratic mean-field Hamiltonian (which in the simplest case is a Slater determinant and in the most general case is a Pfaffian). We also show how to represent products of such states (e.g., determinants times Pfaffians). From this representation one can project to single occupancy and evaluate the entanglement spectra after Gutzwiller projection. We then obtain the MPS and iMPS representation of Gutzwiller projected mean-field states that arise from the variational slave-fermion approach to the
S=1 bilinear-biquadratic quantum spin chain. To accomplish this, we develop an approach to orthogonalize degenerate iMPS to find all the states in the degenerate ground-state manifold. We find the energies of the MPS and iMPS states match the variational energies closely, indicating the method is accurate and there is minimal loss due to truncation error. We then present an exploration of the entanglement spectra of projected slave-fermion states, exploring their qualitative features and finding good qualitative agreement with the respective exact ground-state spectra found from density matrix renormalization group.