A description is provided of the common conceptual origins of many-body equations of motion and Green's function methods in Liouville operator formulations of the quantum mechanics of atomic and molecular electronic structure. Numerical evidence is provided to show the inadequacies of the traditional strictly perturbative approaches to these methods. Nonperturbative methods are introduced by analogy with techniques developed for handling large configuration interaction calculations and by evaluating individual matrix elements to higher accuracy. The important role of higher excitations is exhibited by the numerical calculations, and explicit comparisons are made between converged equations of motion and configuration interaction calculations for systems where a fundamental theorem requires the equality of the energy differences produced by these different approaches.
A description is provided of the common conceptual origins of many-body equations of motion and Green's function methods in Liouville operator formulations of the quantum mechanics of atomic and molecular electronic structure. Numerical evidence is provided to show the inadequacies of the traditional strictly perturbative approaches to these methods. Nonperturbative methods are introduced by analogy with techniques developed for handling large configuration interaction calculations and by evaluating individual matrix elements to higher accuracy. The important role of higher excitations is exhibited by the numerical calculations, and explicit comparisons are made between converged equations of motion and configuration interaction calculations for systems where a fundamental theorem requires the equality of the energy differences produced by these different approaches.
A formulation of many-body perturbation theory starting from the operator equation (H,Q + )= omega Q + is presented. The method of solution is based on an operator scalar product, (X/Y)=Tr(X + Y), which allows the use of resolvent and partitioning techniques to establish Rayleigh-Schrodinger or Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory for the excitation energy and excitation operator, Q + . The excitation operator contains all information about the two states involved in the transition. Specific results are given for removal or addition of an electron and for excitations of particle-hole type and comparison with the Green's function methods is made.
If there were no Coulomb interaction among electrons, it would be relatively straightforward to solve the many-electron Schrödinger equation. It is, however, precisely this interaction that is at the heart of numerous fascinating phenomena in condensed matter physics such as superconductivity, Kondo physics, magnetism, etc. Due to the large number of electrons in a material being of the order of Avogadro's number, it is at present — and perhaps in the foreseeable future — not feasible or even desirable to solve the Schrödinger equation to obtain the many-electron wavefunction. Fortunately, a large number of important physical properties can be calculated without explicit knowledge of the wavefunction. Two of the most important formalisms for dealing with the many-electron problem which avoid a direct use of the many-electron wavefunction are the Green function and the density functional theory. Within the Kohn-Sham scheme the latter is used to calculate ground-state properties whereas the former for excitation spectra. The book presents the fundamentals of these two theories in detail with essential many-body tools, such as the occupation number representation and Grassmann algebra developed from scratch. Prior knowledge of many-body theory is not a prerequisite so that it is readable for final-year undergraduates and graduate students in physics and chemistry as well as researchers in the field of electronic structure and many-body theory. The book includes in the last chapter an exposition of a density-functional path for determining the Green function, a new formalism recently proposed by the author. The book should be a valuable companion for those embarking in the field of many-electron physics.
This dissertation concerns the quantum many-body problem, which is the problem of predicting the properties of systems of several quantum particles from the first principles of quantum mechanics. Included under this umbrella are various problems of fundamental importance in quantum chemistry, condensed matter physics, and materials science. Of particular interest is the electronic structure problem, the problem of determining the state of the electrons in a system with fixed atomic nuclei. Since direct numerical solution of the many-body Schrödinger equation is intractable even for systems of moderate size, a diverse array of approximate methods has been developed. The broad goals of this dissertation are to improve the mathematical understanding of certain widely-used approximations, as well as to propose new methods. Roughly speaking, we consider three (overlapping) categories of methods: Green's function methods, embedding methods, and variational methods.One can understand Green's function methods in terms of many-body perturbation theory, which computes series expansions of physical quantities about a non-interacting reference system. These expansions can be expressed graphically in terms of Feynman diagrams, which can in turn be reorganized, in some cases, into an expansion in terms of so-called bold diagrams. Green's function methods can be specified by choosing a subset of bold diagrams to approximate the sum. At the same time, such methods can be understood in terms of an object known as the Luttinger-Ward (LW) functional, which admits a representation in terms of the bold diagrams. Many aspects of these constructions are purely formal, and indeed the existence of the fermionic LW functional as a single-valued functional has recently been called into question. To contribute to the understanding of these issues, we provide rigorous proofs of the combinatorial construction and analytic interpretation of the bold diagrams in the simplified setting of a classical field theory. In this setting we also provide a rigorous non-perturbative construction of the LW functional via convex duality and prove several key properties, including continuity up to the boundary of its domain and asymptotics in the limit of large interaction.Quantum embedding methods, meanwhile, view a large system as being composed of smaller fragments that are treated with high accuracy and embedded in the larger system in a mutually consistent way. Inspired by a connection between the boundary analysis of the LW functional and embedding, we perform similar analysis for the 1-RDM theory for fermionic systems, which is also developed via convex duality, illustrating a relation to fermionic embedding methods such as the density matrix embedding theory (DMET).Another embedding method of note is the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), which is at the same time a Green's function method that can be understood in terms of the LW functional. DMFT relies on the solution of impurity problems, which specify the embedding of an interacting system into a non-interacting bath. Underlying DMFT is a result about the sparsity pattern of the self-energy matrix for impurity problems, which to our knowledge has not been proved in the literature. We provide a rigorous proof of this result in various classical and quantum settings. We go on to investigate the fermionic DMFT in depth, identifying the key mathematical structures that appear in the algorithmic loop for solving it and using these to prove the well-posedness of this loop, in a certain sense.Finally, we introduce a suite of new approaches to the quantum many-body problem that provide variational lower bounds to the ground-state energy. These methods, which combine the themes of convexity and embedding, are based on novel convex relaxations of the variational principles for the ground-state energies of many-body systems. To begin, we recover a second-quantized version of the formalism of strictly correlated electrons (SCE), which yields an exact expression for the exchange-correlation functional in Kohn-Sham density functional theory in the limit of infinite Coulomb repulsion in terms of the solution of a multi-marginal optimal transport problem. We introduce a semidefinite relaxation method for approximately solving this problem and obtaining a lower bound for the ground-state energy. The ideas underlying this relaxation are generalized considerably, outside the context of SCE, to yield much tighter lower bounds, which we validate numerically for both quantum spin systems and fermionic systems. We also describe how these relaxation methods can be interpreted as embedding methods via convex duality.
Part 1 Fundamentals and examples: systems of identical particles second quantization for fermions second quantization for bosons unitary transformations and field operators example - the Hamiltonian of translationally invariant systems in second quantization density operators the Hartree-Fock approximation restricted Hartree-Fock approximation and the symmetry dilemma Hartree-Fock for translationally invariant systems the homogeneous electron gas in the Hartree-Fock approximation long-range correlations in the electron-gas - plasmons phonons superconductivity. Part 2 Green's functions: pictures the single-particle Green's function and the hierarchy of equations of motion. Part 3 Perturbation theory: time-dependent perturbation theory with adiabatic turning-on of the interaction particle and hole operators and Wick's theorem Feynman diagrams diagrammatic calculation of the vacuum amplitude an example - the Gell-Mann-Brueckner correlation energy of a dense electron gas diagrammatic calculation of the single-particle Green's function - Dyson's equation diagrammatic analysis of the Green's function G(kappa, omega) self-consistent perturbation theory, higher-order Hartree-Fock theory the quasi-particle concept diagrammatic calculation of the two-particle Green's function and the polarization propagator effective interaction and dressed vertices plasmons in higher order perturbation theory at finite temperatures. Part 4 Fermi liquid theory: introduction equilibrium properties transport equation and collective modes microscopic derivation of the Landau fermi liquid theory applications to the Kondo problem.
The equation of motion for nonequilibrium Green functions is derived within the framework of the Schwinger and Keldysh formalism of perturbation expansion. For nonequilibrium distribution Green functions, the equation of motion derived from quantum mechanics contains undefined singularities, whose explicit form depends on the specific initial or boundary condition. In the present work, the exact expression of singular terms is found in the equation of motion from the time-looped perturbation theory in which the adiabatic initial condition is implied. Unlike the usual Dyson perturbation formalism or the well known Kadanoff-Baym equation of motion, our resulting equation can be adopted directly for calculations without the graphical analysis, which depends on the specific form of the Hamiltonian. On the basis of this equation of motion, the procedure of a nonperturbative solution is outlined and potential applications are briefly discussed.
The Green's function method is among the most powerful and versatile formalisms in physics, and its nonequilibrium version has proved invaluable in many research fields. With entirely new chapters and updated example problems, the second edition of this popular text continues to provide an ideal introduction to nonequilibrium many-body quantum systems and ultrafast phenomena in modern science. Retaining the unique and self-contained style of the original, this new edition has been thoroughly revised to address interacting systems of fermions and bosons, simplified many-body approaches like the GKBA, the Bloch equations and the Boltzmann equations and the connection between Green's functions and newly developed time-resolved spectroscopy techniques. Small gaps in the theory have been filled, and frequently overlooked subtleties have been systematically highlighted and clarified. With an abundance of illustrative examples, insightful discussions and modern applications, this book remains the definitive guide for students and researchers alike.