The properties of a Bose system of particles with repulsive interactions have previously been treated using perturbation theory in the formalism of second quantization. Others have also considered this problem by dealing with the wave function in configuration space, using the theory of cluster expansions. In these latter papers, variation with respect to a parameter in a trial function for the ground state has been shown to yield a ground-state energy close to the exact asymptotic expressions obtained from perturbation theory. The connection between the two methods is not immediately obvious from these cluster expansion treatments. It is shown here that, as one might expect, the cluster integral method can be handled so that it is completely equivalent to the pair approximation in perturbation theory.
The many-boson system with repulsive interactions is treated by a variational method based on a variational trial state of an exponential pair-excitation type obtained by a generalization of that of Bogoliubov; the treatment is closely related to an intermediate-coupling approximation with respect to pairs. The nonlinear integral equation which determines the variational ground state is derived, and various properties of this ground state and the associated excited states are examined. The resultant low-lying spectrum lies below that of Bogoliubov by an amount proportional to the total number of particles. The variational principle is shown to produce rigorous energy eigenvalue differences for the pair part of the Hamiltonian. The variational states, however, still exhibit unphysical features characteristic of pair-excitation states: The pair correlation function does not go to zero at zero particle separation and the phonon spectrum exhibits a gap above the ground state. It is suggested that these features can be removed by using states which take into account excitation of momentum-conserving groups of more than two particles.
In this book, we encounter the hierarchy problem when we apply the equation-of-motion technique to analyze the quantum dynamics of the coupled light–matter system. To obtain systematic approximations, we use the so-called cluster-expansion method where many-body quantities are systematically grouped into cluster classes based on how important they are to the overall quantum dynamics. With increasing complexity, the clusters contain independent single particles (singlets), interacting pairs (doublets), three-particle terms (triplets), coupled four-particle contributions (quadruplets), as well as higher-order correlations. In this context, the N -particle concept is somewhat formal because it refers to generic N -particle expectation values 〈 N 〉, which may consist of an arbitrary mixture of carrier, photon, and phonon operators, as discussed in Section 14.2. In order to truncate the hierarchy problem at a given level, 〈 N 〉 is approximated through a functional structure that includes all clusters up to the predetermined level while all remaining clusters with a higher rank are omitted. It is natural that the corresponding approximations can be systematically improved by increasing the number of clusters included. To the best of our knowledge, the idea of coupled-clusters approaches was first formulated by Fritz Coester and Hermann Kümmel in the 1950s to describe nuclear many-body phenomena. The approach was then modified for the needs of quantum chemistry by Jiri Cizek 1966 to deal with many-body phenomena in atoms and molecules. Currently, it is one of the most accurate methods to compute molecular eigenstates.
The ground state of a many-boson system is studied within the range of the Bijl-Dingle-Jastrow-type description when the radial distribution function
g(r) differs little from its asymptotic value. The treatment of the problem is based on the development of power series in $\ensuremath{\alpha}=1\ensuremath{-}g(0)$ for all physical quantities which depend on the particle density. The
n-particle distribution functions
p(n) are evaluated to order ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{4}$ as functionals in the
g(r) function for
n=3and4 using the cluster-expansion procedure outlined by Abe. These results are used in connection with the improvement of the ground-state description when the wave function is not the optimum choice. Using
p(3) function obtained, the Bogoliubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon equation is solved, also to order ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{4}$, for the two-particle correlation function
U(r), and the first two leading corrections to the hypernetted-chain (HNC) approximation are obtained. The variational calculation along with the series expansion for
U(r) yields formulas for the ground-state properties, including some corrections to known results. For a charged boson gas, numerical values of
U(r),
p(3),
p(4), and the ground-state energy are computed using the Gaussian approximation for
g(r), and the results show that the errors associated with the HNC approximation are small. A brief discussion is presented on the method of determining the general expansion coefficients of the correlation functions of
p(n) in terms of
g(r).
The method of many-body point transforms previously developed by the author is modified to eliminate the interacting particle cluster formalism. The cutoff terms in the transformation, and thus in the Hamiltonian, are therefore removed. For the hard-core many-body problem, as in the previous work, a Hamiltonian is obtained which is Fourier analyzable, Hermitian and amenable to ordinary perturbation and variational techniques while still being equivalent to the original Hamiltonian. No approximations are made. It is demonstrated that the use of the standard zeroth-order approximation of the ground state Bose system, i.e., a constant, for the transformed wavefunction gives a negative expectation value of the energy for the hard core system. This discrepancy arises from the extended range of the new potential generated by the transformation, which necessitates explicit consideration of boundary conditions not satisfied by the above wavefunction.