Second-order many-body perturbation theory [MBPT(2)] is the lowest-ranked member of a systematic series of approximations convergent at the exact solutions of the Schrödinger equations. It has served and continues to serve as the testing ground for new approximations, algorithms, and even theories. This article introduces this basic theory from a variety of viewpoints including the Rayleigh-Schrödinger perturbation theory, the many-body Green's function theory based on the Dyson equation, and the related Feynman-Goldstone diagrams. It also explains the important properties of MBPT(2) such as size consistency, its ability to describe dispersion interactions, and divergence in metals. On this basis, this article surveys three major advances made recently by the authors to this theory. They are a finite-temperature extension of MBPT(2) and the resolution of the Kohn-Luttinger conundrum, a stochastic evaluation of the correlation and self-energies of MBPT(2) using the Monte Carlo integration of their Laplace-transformed expressions, and an extension to anharmonic vibrational zero-point energies and transition frequencies based on the Dyson equation.
Second-order many-body perturbation theory [MBPT(2)] is the lowest-ranked member of a systematic series of approximations convergent at the exact solutions of the Schrödinger equations. It has served and continues to serve as the testing ground for new approximations, algorithms, and even theories. This article introduces this basic theory from a variety of viewpoints including the Rayleigh-Schrödinger perturbation theory, the many-body Green's function theory based on the Dyson equation, and the related Feynman-Goldstone diagrams. It also explains the important properties of MBPT(2) such as size consistency, its ability to describe dispersion interactions, and divergence in metals. On this basis, this article surveys three major advances made recently by the authors to this theory. They are a finite-temperature extension of MBPT(2) and the resolution of the Kohn-Luttinger conundrum, a stochastic evaluation of the correlation and self-energies of MBPT(2) using the Monte Carlo integration of their Laplace-transformed expressions, and an extension to anharmonic vibrational zero-point energies and transition frequencies based on the Dyson equation.
Scope The book focuses primarily on many-body (or better, many-electron) methods for electron correlation. These include Rayleigh–Schrödinger perturbation theory (RSPT) , particularly in its diagrammatic representation (referred to as many-body perturbation theory , or MBPT ), and coupled-cluster (CC) theory; their relationship to configuration interaction (CI) is included. Further extensions address properties other than the energy, and also excited states and multireference CC and MBPT methods. The many-body algebraic and diagrammatic methods used in electronic structure theory have their origin in quantum field theory and in the study of nuclear matter and nuclear structure. The second-quantization formalism was first introduced in a treatment of quantized fields by Dirac (1927) and was extended to fermion systems by Jordan and Klein (1927) and by Jordan and Wigner (1928). This formalism is particularly useful in field theory, in scattering problems and in the study of infinite systems because it easily handles problems involving infinite, indefinite or variable numbers of particles. The diagrammatic approach was introduced into field theory by Feynman (1949a,b) and applied to many-body systems by Hugenholtz (1957) and by Goldstone (1957). Many-body perturbation theory and its linked-diagram formalism were first introduced by Brueckner and Levinson (1955) and by Brueckner (1955), and were formalized by Goldstone (1957). Other important contributions to the methodology, first in field theory and then in the theory of nuclear structure, are due to Dyson (1949a,b), Wick (1950), Hubbard (1957, 1958a,b) and Frantz and Mills (1960). Applications to the electronic structure of atoms and molecules began with the work of Kelly (1963, 1964a,b, 1968), and molecular applications using finite analytical basis sets appeared in the work of Bartlett and Silver (1974a, b).
We report an implementation of self-consistent Green's function many-body theory within a second-order approximation (GF2) for application with molecular systems. This is done by iterative solution of the Dyson equation expressed in matrix form in an atomic orbital basis, where the Green's function and self-energy are built on the imaginary frequency and imaginary time domain, respectively, and fast Fourier transform is used to efficiently transform these quantities as needed. We apply this method to several archetypical examples of strong correlation, such as a H32 finite lattice that displays a highly multireference electronic ground state even at equilibrium lattice spacing. In all cases, GF2 gives a physically meaningful description of the metal to insulator transition in these systems, without resorting to spin-symmetry breaking. Our results show that self-consistent Green's function many-body theory offers a viable route to describing strong correlations while remaining within a computationally tractable single-particle formalism.
The widely used thermal Hartree-Fock (HF) theory is generalized to include the effect of electron correlation while maintaining its quasi-independent-particle framework. An electron-correlated internal energy (or grand potential) is postulated in consultation with the second-order finite-temperature many-body perturbation theory (MBPT), which then dictates the corresponding thermal orbital (quasiparticle) energies in such a way that all fundamental thermodynamic relations are obeyed. The associated density matrix is of a one-electron type, whose diagonal elements take the form of the Fermi-Dirac distribution functions, when the grand potential is minimized. The formulas for the entropy and chemical potential are unchanged from those of Fermi-Dirac or thermal HF theory. The theory thus stipulates a finite-temperature extension of the second-order Dyson self-energy of one-particle many-body Green's function theory and can be viewed as a second-order, diagonal, frequency-independent, thermal inverse Dyson equation. At low temperatures, the theory approaches finite-temperature MBPT of the same order, but it may outperform the latter at intermediate temperatures by including additional electron-correlation effects through orbital energies. A physical meaning of these thermal orbital energies is proposed (encompassing that of thermal HF orbital energies, which has been elusive) as a finite-temperature version of Janak's theorem.
A new many-body theory perturbationally consistent to all orders of the perturbation is presented and applied to the Hubbard problem as an example. Use is made of the recent Kim and Wilson commutator projection operator to derive the Dyson equation for the one-particle Green's function and an exact set of coupled differential equations for the damping or self-energy term which are solved self-consistently. The Hubbard I result follows in our first approximation and the Esterling-Lange (EL)-type result in the second. Since we keep the hopping finite throughout the calculation, no degeneracy problem is encountered as in EL.
In many cases, density-functional theory (DFT) with current standard approximate functionals offers a relatively accurate and computationally cheap description of the short-range dynamic electron correlation effects. However, in general, standard DFT does not treat the dispersion interaction effects adequately which, on the other hand, can be described by many-body perturbation theory (MBPT). It is therefore of interest to develop a hybrid model which combines the best of both the MBPT and DFT approaches. This can be achieved by splitting the two-electron interaction into long-range and short-range parts; the long-range part is then treated by MBPT and the short-range part by DFT. This work deals with the formulation of a general MBPT-DFT model (i.e., valid for any type of zeroth-order Hamiltonian) based on such a range separation. Applying the Rayleigh-Schr\"odinger formalism in this context, one finds that the generalized Bloch equation becomes self-consistent at each order of perturbation. This complication arises because the short-range part of the energy is a functional of the exact electron density, which is expanded in a perturbation series. In order to address this ``self-consistency problem'' and provide computable orbital-based expressions for any order of perturbation, a general one-electron reduced-density-matrix-based formalism is proposed. Two applications of our general formalism are presented: The derivation of a hybrid second-order M\o{}ller-Plesset-DFT model and the formulation of a range-separated optimized effective potential method based on a hybrid G\"orling-Levy-type MBPT-DFT model.
We fully develop the Monte Carlo many-body Green’s function (MC-GF) method with the following enhancements: (1) The truncation order of the perturbation expansion of the Dyson self-energy is raised from the second order (MC-GF2) to the third order (MC-GF3) with the aid of a computerized procedure to enumerate and transform all 84 third-order Goldstone diagrams into Monte Carlo integrable expressions and then into central processing unit (CPU)/graphical processing unit (GPU)-parallel computer codes. (2) An efficient algorithm is proposed that computes all off-diagonal and diagonal elements of the MC-GF2 and MC-GF3 self-energy matrices by common subexpression elimination. (3) The frequency-independent approximation is lifted by introducing a method that computes frequency derivatives of the MC-GF2 and MC-GF3 self-energies up to any arbitrarily high order at nearly no additional computational cost. (4) The imaginary-time integration in the Laplace-transformed expressions of the self-energy is carried out stochastically (instead of using a quadrature in the previous implementations), resulting in a 50- to 200-fold speedup. (5) The efficiency of the redundant-walker convergence acceleration scheme is analyzed numerically, and the guidelines are established to select an optimal number of walkers for maximal efficiency. When such an optimal number is used, the cost per sample is constant of molecular size on either many CPUs or many GPUs. (6) The computational cost to obtain a binding energy within a given statistical uncertainty is observed to increase as (tentatively) O( n 4 ) and O( n 5 ) of molecular size ( n is the number of electrons) with and without the diagonal approximation, respectively, as opposed to O( n 5 ) and O( n 6 ) of the corresponding deterministic algorithms. With this method applied to the electron binding energies of C 60, we show that the third-order corrections to the self-energies are much greater in electron binding energies than in ground-state energies. They display a sign of oscillatory convergence toward experimental results, not necessarily improving the agreement with increasing perturbation order, justifying MC-GF3 and motivating even higher-order methods.