Analytical properties of self-energy and Luttinger-Ward functional

Sohrab Ismail‐Beigi

Michael Potthoff

Giovanna Lani, Nicola Marzari

We investigate analytically the performance of many-body energy functionals, derived by Klein, Luttinger, and Ward, at different levels of diagrammatic approximations, ranging from second Born, to , to the so-called T matrix, for the calculation of total energies and potential energy surfaces. We benchmark our theoretical results on the extended two-site Hubbard model, which is analytically solvable and for which several exact properties can be calculated. Despite its simplicity, this model displays the physics of strongly correlated electrons: it is prototypical of the H 2 dissociation, a notoriously difficult problem to solve accurately for the majority of mean-field-based approaches. We show that both functionals exhibit good to excellent variational properties, particularly in the case of the Luttinger-Ward one, which is in close agreement with fully self-consistent calculations, and we elucidate the relation between the accuracy of the results and the different input one-body Green's functions. Provided that these are wisely chosen, we show how the Luttinger-Ward functional can be used as a computationally inexpensive alternative to fully self-consistent many-body calculations, without sacrificing the precision of the results obtained. Furthermore, in virtue of this accuracy, we argue that this functional can also be used to rank different many-body approximations at different regimes of electronic correlation, once again bypassing the need for self-consistency. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Michael Potthoff

R. Eder

The known analytical properties of the Green's function and self-energy rule out an ambiguity of the self-energy. The noninteracting Green's functions obtained by Kozik et al. in arXiv:1407.5687 likely have pathological properties.

J. Vučičević, Nils Wentzell, Michel Ferrero +1 more

The Luttinger-Ward functional (LWF) has been a starting point for conserving approximations in many-body physics for 50 years. The recent discoveries of its multivaluedness and the associated divergence of the two-particle irreducible vertex function $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}$ have revealed an inherent limitation of this approach. Here we demonstrate how these undesirable properties of the LWF can lead to a failure of computational methods based on an approximation of the LWF. We apply the nested cluster scheme (NCS) to the Hubbard model and observe the existence of an additional stationary point of the self-consistent equations, associated with an unphysical branch of the LWF. In the strongly correlated regime, starting with the first divergence of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}$, this unphysical stationary point becomes attractive in the standard iterative technique used to solve DMFT. This leads to an incorrect solution, even in the large cluster size limit, for which we discuss diagnostics.