A nonperturbative, controllable, and moment-conserving decoupling approach is proposed. Our assumption is that a higher-order Green function (GF) essentially contains two-part information. One part relates to the single-particle GF, which is involved in the corresponding moment; the other part is a higher-order quantity, which is independent of the single-particle GF. Thus the higher-order GF may be separated into two corresponding terms. We derive the chain of equations of motion (EOM) of the latter term from the usual EOM for GF's. To solve the equations a truncation approximation is made at the level desired. The single-band Hubbard model is studied using this approach. Moment-conserving solutions up to the order
m=2 are obtained. The properties of a solution corresponding to the Hubbard-I approximation level are discussed in detail. The quasiparticle bands and the momentum distribution are in excellent agreement with the results from the quantum Monte Carlo simulation.
In the usual theory of the two-time Green's function, decoupling techniques are introduced in order to obtain a self-closed equation for the lowest order Green's function. These decouplings give neither the correct temperature dependence (the absence of a
T3 term) of magnetization nor the correct correlation function $〈{{S}_{j}}^{\ensuremath{-}}{{S}_{j}}^{\ensuremath{-}}{{S}_{k}}^{+}{{S}_{l}}^{+}〉$, which should be zero by definition. In this paper the equation of motion for the higher order Green's function is solved in the approximation which will lead to correct results up to terms of order
T3 in these quantities. Employing this higher order Green's function, it is found that the correction to the magnetization consists of a term of order
T4 and a divergent term and that the correlation function consists of a term of order
T3 and a divergent term. A method extracting a significant part from this divergent term is found by analyzing a system of two interacting \textonehalf{} spins. By this method, it is shown that the
T3 term in the magnetization is completely eliminated and that the correlation function $〈{{S}_{j}}^{\ensuremath{-}}{{S}_{j}}^{\ensuremath{-}}{{S}_{k}}^{+}{{S}_{l}}^{+}〉$ vanishes identically.