A variational approach to the approximate solution of a wide variety of self-consistency problems is described. Attention is focused on the variational formulation of the nonlinear integral equation, which determines the single-particle Green's function of a many-particle system; such an equation arises from a particular truncation of the hierarchy of equations which dynamically couple the complete set of Green's functions. To illustrate the method, we have applied it, with encouraging results, to the numerical determination of the self-energy function for the helium atom in the Hartree-Fock approximation. The applicability of this approach to the general problem of electron-atom scattering is pointed out.
A variational approach to the approximate solution of a wide variety of self-consistency problems is described. Attention is focused on the variational formulation of the nonlinear integral equation, which determines the single-particle Green's function of a many-particle system; such an equation arises from a particular truncation of the hierarchy of equations which dynamically couple the complete set of Green's functions. To illustrate the method, we have applied it, with encouraging results, to the numerical determination of the self-energy function for the helium atom in the Hartree-Fock approximation. The applicability of this approach to the general problem of electron-atom scattering is pointed out.
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.
To avoid confusion, it is necessary to be quite explicit about what is assumed and what is to be proved. A. Klein, Phys. Rev. 121, 950 (1961) Summary The topic of this chapter is functionals that provide a concise formulation for thermodynamic quantities and Green's function methods in interacting many-body systems. Building upon the instructive examples of density functional theory and the Hartree– Fock approximation, functionals of the Green's function are developed to provide a framework for practical methods used extensively in many-body perturbation theory (Chs. 9–15), dynamical mean-field theory (Chs. 16–20), and their combination in Ch. 21. Functional concepts give a firm foundation for those methods, for example, they give the conditions for approximations to obey conservation laws. Additional background and specific aspects are in App. H. Many physical quantities can be expressed as functionals , i.e., they depend on an entire function.1 For example, in the quantum variational method to determine a wavefunction, the total energy of a system of many electrons is a functional of a many-body trial wavefunction ( r 1 , r 2 , …): it is the expectation value of the hamiltonian. At the variational minimum, assuming the trial wavefunction is completely flexible, one finds the many-body Schrödinger equation for the ground state. Many of the properties we are interested in are, formally, simple functionals of the ground- or excited-state wavefunctions. In the search for feasible ways to calculate properties such as excitation spectra, we are led to different types of functional. The idea is to deal only with a physical, measurable quantity Q of interest and a variational functional E [ Q ] of this quantity. The variational character of E allows one to derive equations that determine Q 0 , the value of Q for the system in a desired state, typically the ground state or equilibrium state at T ≠ 0. Other properties should be different functionals F m [ Q ] that can then be evaluated at Q = Q 0 . This strategy is outlined in Fig. 8.1. To appreciate the power of such approaches, one can consider the impact of density functional theory, which is formulated as a functional of the density n ( r ) of electrons; it is defined for a range of densities and the variational minimum for the energy functional E [ n ] leads to equations to determine the actual ground-state density n 0 ( r ) and total energy E 0 .
Integral equations of the Watson-Faddeev type, developed in the context of few-body nonrelativistic scattering theory, are shown to play an important role in the structure analysis of many-body Green's functions and in variational techniques for the approximate determination of these Green's functions. Such equations sum up an infinite chain of few-body correlations. Those correlations which are not of this form, i.e., the intrinsic many-body correlations, are accounted for by the appearance of an effective (or "renormalized") interaction, as can be seen by direct transformation of the exact Martin-Schwinger equations for the Green's functions. For a given choice of effective interaction, the few-body correlation functions must be determined self-consistently. The Schwinger variational principle, originally developed for linear integral equations, is nevertheless the key element in a variational formulation of the nonlinear equations encountered here. For simplicity we confine our attention to equations which determine the two-body Green's function, although the entire procedure can be generalized to higher orders.
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.
We develop a variational approach at finite temperature that incorporates many-body correlation self-consistently. The grand potential is constructed in terms of Green's function expressed by the variational parameters. We apply this formalism to weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates to incorporate the dynamical 3/2-body processes, which are considered important in the dynamical properties. The processes lower the free energy below the mean-field Hartree--Fock--Bogoliubov's value in the same way as a previous zero-temperature formalism. From our numerical results, the pair creation or annihilation processes neglected in the Popov--Shohno approximation are enhanced, particularly in the long wavelength region, owing to the many-body effects. Because the 3/2-body correlations give a finite contribution to the self-energy of quasiparticles, they may change the microscopic properties qualitatively, even in the weak-coupling region.
A review of electronic dynamics of single-impurity and many-impurity Anderson models is contained in this report. Those models are used widely for many of the applications in diverse fields of interest, such as surface physics, theory of chemisorption and adsorbate reactions on metal surfaces, physics of intermediate valence systems, theory of heavy fermions, physics of quantum dots and other nanostructures. While standard treatments are generally based on perturbation methods, our approach is based on the non-perturbative technique for the thermodynamic Green functions. The method of the irreducible Green functions is used as the basic tool. This irreducible Green functions method allows one to describe the quasiparticle spectra with damping of the strongly correlated electron systems in a very general and natural way and to construct the relevant dynamical solution in a self-consistent way on the level of Dyson equation without decoupling the chain of the equations of motion for the Green functions. The subject matter includes the improved interpolating solution of the Anderson model. It was shown that an interpolating approximation, which simultaneously reproduces the weak-coupling limit up to second order in the interaction strength U and the strong-coupling limit up to second order in the hybridization V (and thus also fulfils the atomic limit) can be formulated self-consistently. This approach offers a new way for the systematic construction of approximate interpolation dynamical solutions of strongly correlated electron systems.