The Cluster Expansion

James G. Glimm, Arthur Jaffe

J. Fujita

A. Isihara

Krishnanand Mallayya, Marcos Rigol

We discuss the application of numerical linked cluster expansions (NLCEs) to study one dimensional lattice systems in thermal equilibrium and after quantum quenches from thermal equilibrium states. For the former, we calculate observables in the grand canonical ensemble, and for the latter we calculate observables in the diagonal ensemble. When converged, NLCEs provide results in the thermodynamic limit. We use two different NLCEs: a maximally connected expansion introduced in previous works and a site-based expansion. We compare the effectiveness of both NLCEs. The site-based NLCE is found to work best for systems in thermal equilibrium. However, in thermal equilibrium and after quantum quenches, the site-based NLCE can diverge when the maximally connected one converges. We relate this divergence to the exponentially large number of clusters in the site-based NLCE and the behavior of the weights of observables in those clusters. We discuss the effectiveness of resummations to cure the divergence. Our NLCE calculations are compared to exact diagonalization ones in lattices with periodic boundary conditions. NLCEs are found to outperform exact diagonalization in periodic systems for all quantities studied.

William J. Shugard, John D. Weeks

We give a simple derivation of a finite cluster expansion for the free energy of a general inhomogeneous lattice system which uses only connected clusters. Two possible ways of defining these clusters are discussed in detail, one most useful for obtaining high-temperature series expansions and another low-temperature expansions. A renormalized finite cluster expansion which uses only multiply connected or star clusters follows from a Legendre transformation on the free energy in which single-site potentials are replaced as independent variables by single-site probability distribution functions. Certain special cases of these results have been known before and successfully used to derive high-temperature series expansions. The relationship of the present approach to the renormalized linked-cluster perturbation expansion used by Wortis and co-workers is discussed, and comparison is also made with the work of Rushbrook and Scoins. Truncations of the renormalized cluster expansion yield closed-form approximations which, except in the critical region, offer a systematic way of improving mean-field theory.

D. J. Thouless

In order to go over from a perturbation expansion of the grand partition function (the unlinked-cluster expansion) to an expansion of the thermodynamic potential (the linked-cluster expansion) in powers of the interaction, it is necessary to treat carefully those terms in which creation (or annihilation) operators for the same state occur twice or more. The unlinked- and linked-cluster expansions for a system of fermions are here shown to be equivalent by a direct comparison of the terms which occur in each. The relation between the two expansions is illustrated by the example of a system of fermions interacting only with a single-particle potential.