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Physical Review A

Many-body formalism for fermions: Enforcing the Pauli principle on paper

D. K. Watson

Published Jul 23, 2015• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Confined quantum systems involving $N$ identical interacting fermions are found in many areas of physics, including condensed matter, atomic, nuclear, and chemical physics. In a previous series of papers, a many-body perturbation method that is applicable to both weakly and strongly interacting systems of bosons has been set forth by the author and coworkers. A symmetry-invariant perturbation theory was developed that uses group theory coupled with the dimension of space as the perturbation parameter to obtain an analytic correlated wave function through first order for a system under spherical confinement with a general two-body interaction. In the present paper, we extend this formalism to large systems of fermions, circumventing the numerical demands of applying the Pauli principle by enforcing the Pauli principle on paper. The method does not scale in complexity with $N$ and has minimal numerical cost. We apply the method to a unitary Fermi gas and compare to recent Monte Carlo values.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.013628

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Confined quantum systems involving NNN identical interacting fermions are found in many areas of physics, including condensed matter, atomic, nuclear, and chemical physics. In a previous series of papers, a many-body perturbation method that is applicable to both weakly and strongly interacting systems of bosons has been set forth by the author and coworkers. A symmetry-invariant perturbation theory was developed that uses group theory coupled with the dimension of space as the perturbation parameter to obtain an analytic correlated wave function through first order for a system under spherical confinement with a general two-body interaction. In the present paper, we extend this formalism to large systems of fermions, circumventing the numerical demands of applying the Pauli principle by enforcing the Pauli principle on paper. The method does not scale in complexity with NNN and has minimal numerical cost. We apply the method to a unitary Fermi gas and compare to recent Monte Carlo values.
Confined quantum systems involving NNN identical interacting fermions are found in many areas of physics, including condensed matter, atomic, nuclear and chemical physics. In a previous series of papers, a manybody perturbation method that is applicable to both weakly and strongly-interacting systems of bosons has been set forth by the author and coworkers. A symmetry invariant perturbation theory was developed which uses group theory coupled with the dimension of space as the perturbation parameter to obtain an analytic correlated wave function through first order for a system under spherical confinement with a general two-body interaction. In the present paper, we extend this formalism to large systems of fermions, circumventing the numerical demands of applying the Pauli principle by enforcing the Pauli principle on paper. The method does not scale in complexity with NNN and has minimal numerical cost. We apply the method to a unitary Fermi gas and compare to recent Monte Carlo values.
Enforcing the Pauli principle in many-body systems of fermions to ensure an antisymmetric wave function is typically a numerically expensive task. Numerical methods, such as coupled-cluster, correlated basis function, Monte Carlo, and traditional configuration interaction, scale with powers of NNN that make the determination of the energy spectrum of these systems a challenge. In a recent paper, we successfully obtained energies for large systems of fermions in the unitary regime in which we applied the Pauli principle ``on paper'' without obtaining an explicit wave function. This approach, an extension of the symmetry invariant perturbation method to fermions, applies the Pauli principle by imposing restrictions on the quantum numbers used to obtain the energy. As a followup to this study, we perform an explicit test of the validity of this application of the Pauli principle by comparing our energy results against the energies corresponding to explicitly antisymmetrized wave functions for an exactly solvable system of harmonically confined, harmonically interacting fermions. Our results show that our simple method of applying the Pauli principle selects from a spectrum of possible many-body energies only those energies that correspond to explicitly antisymmetrized wave functions. Our results were tested for values of NNN through $\ensuremath{\approx}10 000$ and for weak and strong interactions both repulsive and attractive.
The partition function, a fundamental tenet in statistical thermodynamics, contains in principle all thermodynamic information about a system. It encapsulates both microscopic information through the quantum energy levels and statistical information from the partitioning of the particles among the available energy levels. For identical particles, this statistical accounting is complicated by the symmetry requirements of the allowed quantum states. In particular, for Fermi systems, the enforcement of the Pauli principle is typically a numerically demanding task, responsible for much of the cost of the calculations. The interplay of these three elements---the structure of the many-body spectrum, the statistical partitioning of the NNN particles among the available levels, and the enforcement of the Pauli principle---drives the behavior of mesoscopic and macroscopic Fermi systems. In this paper, we develop an approach for the determination of the partition function, a numerically difficult task, for systems of strongly interacting identical fermions and apply it to a model system of harmonically confined, harmonically interacting fermions. This approach uses a recently introduced many-body method that is an extension of the symmetry-invariant perturbation method (SPT) originally developed for bosons. It uses group theory and graphical techniques to avoid the heavy computational demands of conventional many-body methods which typically scale exponentially with the number of particles. The SPT application of the Pauli principle is trivial to implement since it is done ``on paper'' by imposing restrictions on the normal-mode quantum numbers at first order in the perturbation. The method is applied through first order and represents an extension of the SPT method to excited states. Our method of determining the partition function and various thermodynamic quantities is accurate and efficient and has the potential to yield interesting insight into the role played by the Pauli principle and the influence of large degeneracies on the emergence of the thermodynamic behavior of large-NNN systems.
Confined quantum systems involving NNN identical interacting particles are to be found in many areas of physics, including condensed-matter, atomic, and chemical physics. A beyond-mean-field perturbation method that is applicable, in principle, to weakly, intermediate, and strongly interacting systems has been set forth by the authors in a previous series of papers. Dimensional perturbation theory was used, and in conjunction with group theory, an analytic beyond-mean-field correlated wave function at lowest order for a system under spherical confinement with a general two-body interaction was derived. In the present paper, we use this analytic wave function to derive the corresponding lowest-order, analytic density profile and apply it to the example of a Bose-Einstein condensate.
The resources required to solve the general interacting quantum NNN-body problem scale exponentially with NNN, making the solution of this problem very difficult when NNN is large. In a previous series of papers we develop an approach for a fully interacting wave function for a confined system of identical bosons with a general two-body interaction. This method tames the NNN scaling by developing a perturbation series that is order-by-order invariant under a point group isomorphic with SN{S}_{N}SN​. Group theory and graphical techniques are then used to solve for the wave function exactly and analytically at each order, yielding a solution for the general NNN-body problem which scales as N0{N}^{0}N0 at any given order. Recently this formalism has been used to obtain the first-order fully interacting wave function for a system of harmonically confined bosons interacting harmonically. In this paper, we report the application of this NNN-body wave function to a system of NNN fully interacting bosons in three dimensions. We derive an expression for the density profile for a confined system of harmonically interacting bosons. Choosing this simple interaction is not necessary or even advantageous for our method, however this choice allows a direct comparison of our exact results through first order with exact results obtained in an independent solution. Our density profile for the wave function through first order in three dimensions is indistinguishable from the first-order exact result obtained independently and shows strong convergence to the exact result to all orders.
Lattice field theory methods, usually associated with non-perturbative studies of quantum chromodynamics, are becoming increasingly common in the calculation of ground-state and thermal properties of strongly interacting non-relativistic few- and many-body systems, blurring the interfaces between condensed matter, atomic and low-energy nuclear physics. While some of these techniques have been in use in the area of condensed matter physics for a long time, others, such as hybrid Monte Carlo and improved effective actions, have only recently found their way across areas. With this topical review, we aim to provide a modest overview and a status update on a few notable recent developments. For the sake of brevity we focus on zero-temperature, non-relativistic problems. After a short introduction, we lay out some general considerations and proceed to discuss sampling algorithms, observables, and systematic effects. We show selected results on ground- and excited-state properties of fermions in the limit of unitarity. The appendix contains details on group theory on the lattice.