A formulation of the energy eigenvalue problem for a many-particle system is presented in several alternative forms and, following Brueckner and his collaborators, the energy of the system is expressed in terms of solutions to the two-body problem. This work bears considerable resemblance to Brueckner's "linked cluster" expansion. The present expansion is derived with the aid of an ordering operator and involves a sequence of "nearest neighbor" interactions. The particles tend to form "chains," the sequence of approximations involving "two-particle chains," "three-particle chains," etc. The rapidity of convergence of the method depends on the particle density and "temperature" and on the nature of the force between particles. The method lends itself readily to use in statistical mechanics. Some applications to the calculation of the equation of state of a gas are included.
An approximation method developed previously to deal with many particles in strong interaction is examined in further detail. It is shown that the series giving the interaction energy is a development in a sequence of linked or irreducible cluster terms each of which gives a contribution to the energy proportional to the total number of particles. Consequently the convergence of the expansion is independent of the total number of particles. The origin of this simple feature is illustrated by showing that a similar situation exists in the expansion of standard perturbation theory. The numerical convergence of the expansion is quantitatively discussed for the nuclear problem where it is shown that the correction arising from the first cluster term involving three particles is less than the leading term by a factor of about ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$. The smallness of the correction is largely a result of the action of the exclusion principle.
The problem of correlations is considered in many-fermion systems, although with some modifications the methods are more general. The many-body problem is formulated in terms of reduced one- and two-particle density matrices, and the equations for these are treated by variational and iterative methods. The formalism is applied to a calculation of the energy per particle for a system interacting with Coulomb, screened Coulomb, and singular potentials. Comparisons with the ideas of Brueckner and others are made, and difficulties are discussed.
The general form of the energy of the ground state of a many-fermion system is shown to be exactly of the form proposed by Brueckner and Bethe, without approximation. In a variational treatment, if the trial wave function is picked containing only pair correlations, together with all possible unlinked pairs, it is described by a two-body excitation matrix
〈m1m2∣A∣p1p2〉. Variation of this matrix in the Ritz-Rayleigh principle yields a set of integral equations of the scattering type for the matrix
A. Hole-state energies are given self-consistently in terms of the matrix
A, but particle-state energies are Hartree-Fock energies. This may be corrected for by widely enlarging the class of terms admitted into the wave function. If the approximation is then made of omitting a class of terms, defined as cross-linked clusters in $〈\ensuremath{\psi}|H|\ensuremath{\psi}〉$, the particle-state energies are easily renormalized. Variation then leads to an infinite hierarchy of integral equations.
A perturbation treatment is presented for the operator
u(t) giving the evolution of the state vector of a system of
N particles coupled by 2-body forces. The total Hamiltonian is divided into a diagonal part
H0 and off-diagonal part
H1 in the representation with
N-particle plane-wave states as basis. An effective pair-interaction operator
H1 is defined which includes "vertex" corrections of all orders, and the off-diagonal part of
u is expressed exactly by an expansion which involves only
H1 and the exact diagonal part of
u. A closed set of equations determining
H1 and the diagonal part of
u are obtained by retaining only the leading terms in the expansion. These equations include all the corrections included in the Brueckner approximation and, in addition, they contain 3-body effects, iterated to all orders, which are omitted in that approximation. No one-to-one correspondence between the eigenstates of
H0 and those of the total Hamiltonian is appealed to, and the ground state plays no special role. The connection with statistical mechanics follows the fact that the partition function is $\mathrm{Tr}[u(\ensuremath{-}\frac{i}{\mathrm{kT}})]$. The theory simplifies greatly for very large
N.
Perturbation theoretic equations for several properties of the zero-temperature many-fermion normal system are rederived from general considerations. Though none of the equations are new, some of the derivations are, and taken together they form a brief and simple summary of many-fermion relations and a basis for further investigation of the basic perturbation description of the many-fermion normal system: the Brueckner-Goldstone expansion. A "change-of-parameter" technique is then developed and employed to investigate the possible use of the true momentum density instead of the unperturbed Fermi distribution in the Brueckner-Goldstone expansion and in the Brueckner
K-matrix approximation. The result is a simpler, approximate perturbation series for the interaction energy, whose accuracy for nuclear matter is estimated to be approximately \ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}2 MeV. The new approximation is exact to the fourth order.