It is shown that important simplifications can be made in a variational calculation of the ground-state two-particle density matrix of an N-particle system if the system is translation-invariant.
We discuss the one-particle density-matrix functional theory for the N-particle ground-state problem. Using the variational principle we obtain a set of self-consistent equations which could be useful for practical calculations. The derived relation between the eigenvalues of the density matrix and the chemical potential agrees with that of Gilbert. The present theory is compared with the Kohn–Sham and the Hartree–Fock approach to the ground state problem. It is found that both approaches can be obtained from the present theory under certain assumptions.
A variational upper bound on the ground state energy E gs of a quantum system, E gs ⩽ 〈Ψ| H |Ψ〉, is well-known (here H is the Hamiltonian of the system and Ψ is an arbitrary wave function). Much less known are variational lower bounds on the ground state. We consider one such bound which is valid for a many-body translation-invariant lattice system. Such a lattice can be divided into clusters which are identical up to translations. The Hamiltonian of such a system can be written as , where a term H i is supported on the i 'th cluster. The bound reads , where is some wisely chosen set of reduced density matrices of a single cluster. The implementation of this latter variational principle can be hampered by the difficulty of parameterizing the set , which is a necessary prerequisite for a variational procedure. The root cause of this difficulty is the nonlinear positivity constraint ρ > 0 which is to be satisfied by a density matrix. The squaring parametrization of the density matrix, ρ = τ 2 /tr τ 2 , where τ is an arbitrary (not necessarily positive) Hermitian operator, accounts for positivity automatically. We discuss how the squaring parametrization can be utilized to find variational lower bounds on ground states of translation-invariant many-body systems. As an example, we consider a one-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet.
Abstract This work incorporates translational and reflection symmetry reductions to the variational determination of the two-particle reduced density matrix (2-RDM) corresponding to the ground state of N -particle systems, within the doubly occupied configuration interaction (DOCI) space. By exploiting these symmetries within this lower-bound variational methodology it is possible to treat larger systems than those previously studied. The 2-RDM matrix elements are calculated by imposing up to four-particle N -representability constraint conditions using standard semidefinite programing algorithms. The method is applied to the one- and two-dimensional XXZ spin 1/2 model of quantum magnetism. Several observables including the energy and the spin–spin correlation functions are obtained to assess the physical content of the variationally determined 2-RDM. Comparison with quantum-Monte Carlo and matrix product state simulations shows that in most cases only requiring up to three-particle positivity conditions is enough to correctly describe the ground-state properties of these one- and two-dimensional models.