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Physical Review Letters

Can the Eigenstates of a Many-Body Hamiltonian Be Represented Exactly Using a General Two-Body Cluster Expansion?

Marcel Nooijen

Published Mar 6, 2000• 102 citations

Abstract

Using a general two-body exponential parametrization for the wave function, the Nakatsuji two-particle density equation [Phys. Rev. A 14, 41 (1976)] is transformed into a set of nonlinear algebraic equations in which the number of unknowns precisely equals the number of equations. Since the Nakatsuji two-particle density equation is equivalent to the time-independent Schrodinger equation for Hamiltonians containing up to two-body interactions, the answer to the title question is affirmative, provided the equations have solutions. Practical implications of the parametrization and possible approximation schemes are briefly discussed.

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.84.2108

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Using a general two-body exponential parametrization for the wave function, the Nakatsuji two-particle density equation [Phys. Rev. A 14, 41 (1976)] is transformed into a set of nonlinear algebraic equations in which the number of unknowns precisely equals the number of equations. Since the Nakatsuji two-particle density equation is equivalent to the time-independent Schrodinger equation for Hamiltonians containing up to two-body interactions, the answer to the title question is affirmative, provided the equations have solutions. Practical implications of the parametrization and possible approximation schemes are briefly discussed.

It is proved that a recent conjecture that the exact ground-state wave function of an arbitrary many-fermion system with one- and two-body interactions may be represented by an exponential cluster expansion employing finite two-body operators, starting from any reference function sufficiently close to the exact eigenfunction, is not valid. We show that the space of initial reference functions which lead to the exact ground state is of dimension equal to the number of two-body operators. If the dimension of the multiparticle space is greater than the number of two-body operators, then the space of good reference functions is of measure zero in it.

Recent studies have considered the possibility that the exact ground-state wavefunction from any Hamiltonian with two-particle interactions may be generated from a single finite two-body exponential transformation acting on an arbitrary Slater determinant [Piecuch et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 113001 (2003)]. Using the Campbell-Baker-Hausdorff relation, we show that it is difficult for the variational minimum of this trial wave function to satisfy the contracted Schr\"odinger equation which is a necessary and sufficient condition for the wave function to satisfy the Schr\"odinger equation. A counterexample is presented through the Lipkin quasispin model with 4--50 fermions. When the number of fermions exceeds four, the wave function from a finite two-body exponential transformation is shown to be inexact. If the trial wave function ansatz is extended to include products of finite two-body exponential transformations acting on an arbitrary Slater-determinant reference, then we show that the ansatz includes the exact ground-state wave function from any Hamiltonian with only two-particle interactions. Connections between the two-body exponential transformation of the wave function and recent research on two-body exponential similarity transformations of the Hamiltonian [S.R. White, J. Chem. Phys. 117, 7472 (2002)] are discussed.

It is virtually impossible to directly solve the Schrödinger equation for a many-electron wave function due to the exponential growth in degrees of freedom with increasing particle number. The two-body reduced density matrix (2-RDM) formalism reduces this coordinate dependence to that of four particles irrespective of the wave function's dimensionality, providing a promising path to solve the many-body problem. Unfortunately, errors arise in this approach because the 2-RDM cannot practically be constrained to guarantee that it corresponds to a valid wave function. Here we approach this so-called

N

-representability problem by expanding the 2-RDM in a complete basis of two-electron wave functions and studying the matrix formed by the expansion coefficients. This quantity, which we call the geminal density matrix (GDM), is found to evolve in time by a unitary transformation that preserves

N

-representability. This evolution law enables us to calculate eigenstates of strongly correlated systems by a fictitious adiabatic evolution in which the electron-electron interaction is slowly switched on. We show how this technique is used to diagonalize atomic Hamiltonians, finding that the problem reduces to the solution of

\sim N(N-1)/2

two-electron eigenstates of the Helium atom on a grid of electron-electron interaction scaling factors.

The minimum parameterization of the wave function is derived for the time-independent many-body problem. In this parameterization all electrons and electron pairs are indistinguishable which eliminates the exponential scaling with the number of particles plaguing all other correlation methods. An exponential scaling shown to stem from the expansion of the wave function in one-particle basis sets. It is demonstrated that using a geminal basis with a skew-symmetric orthogonal coefficient matrix, which fulfill a Lie algebra, the parameterization of the exact wave function becomes independent of the number of particles and only scale quadratic with the number of basis functions in the optimized basis and quartic in an arbitrary basis. The resulting antisymmetrized geminal power wave function is shown to fulfill the necessary and sufficient conditions for the exact wave function, treat all electrons and electron pairs as indistinguishable and be the most compact representation of the exact wave function possible. The number of parameters in the antisymmetrized geminal power wave function is exactly the same number of parameters as in the two-particle reduced density matrix thereby showing that these representations are equivalent just like the representations for a one-particle Hamiltonian. A detailed discussion of how the most compact wave function can be derived in general is also presented along with different geminal ansatze and sufficient closure relations. Due to the breaking of the scaling wall for the exact wave function it is expected that, if a general set of constraints can be found, even systems of biological relevance can be treated exactly in the future.

Progress toward the solution of the strongly correlated electron problem has been stymied by the exponential complexity of the wave function. Previous work established an exact two-body exponential product expansion for the ground-state wave function. By developing a reduced density-matrix analog of Dalgarno-Lewis perturbation theory, we prove here that (i) the two-body exponential product expansion is rapidly and globally convergent with each operator representing an order of a renormalized perturbation theory, (ii) the energy of the expansion converges quadratically near the solution, and (iii) the expansion is exact for both ground and excited states. The two-body expansion offers a reduced parametrization of the many-particle wave function as well as the two-particle reduced density matrix with potential applications on both conventional and quantum computers for the study of strongly correlated quantum systems. We demonstrate the result with the exact solution of the contracted Schr\"odinger equation for the molecular chains

N

and

{\mathrm{H}}_{5}

.