The Hartree-Fock Approximation

Michele Fabrizio

Pan Zhang

The occupation renormalized Hartree-Fock single particle potential is extended to include the 'particle' state occupation. The exact solution, the solution of the occupation renormalized Hartree-Fock approximation and that of the Hartree-Fock approximation are calculated in Lipkin Model. It turns out that the RHF solution is more close to the exact one than the HF solution. The effect of occupation probability depends on the strength of the interaction of the two body term.

Hideo Fukutome

We develop a new general theory for large quantum fluctuations in a Fermion many-body system that cannot be described by fluctuations around the Hartree-Fock ground state but arises from resonance of different correlation structures. We start with an exact coherent state representation of a Fermion system on a unitary group. We show that the Hamiltonian in the coherent state representation has a close connection with the Hartree-Fock energy functional. From this, we can derive a new approximation called the resonating Hartree-Fock approximation in which a state is approximated by a superposition of non-orthogonal Slater determinants with different correlation structures. We derive the variation equations to determine a resonating Hartree-Fock wavefunction. We show that the resonance between degenerate broken symmetry Slater determinants may partially recover the symmetry. We discuss how to choose trial Slater determinants in a resonating Hartree-Fock wavefunction. We suggest that resonance of Slater determinats representing localized defects, such as solitons, polarons and breathers, produced in the long range order of the HF ground state may be the most important content of large quantum fluctuations in condensed matter systems.

P. Fanto, Y. Alhassid, G. F. Bertsch

Finite-temperature mean-field theories, such as the Hartree--Fock (HF) and Hartree--Fock--Bogoliubov (HFB) theories, are formulated in the grand-canonical ensemble, and their applications to the calculation of statistical properties of nuclei such as level densities require a reduction to the canonical ensemble. In a previous publication [Y. Alhassid et al., Phys. Rev. C 93, 044320 (2016)], it was found that ensemble-reduction methods based on the saddle-point approximation are not reliable in cases in which rotational symmetry or particle-number conservation is broken. In particular, the calculated HFB canonical entropy can be unphysical as a result of the inherent violation of particle-number conservation. In this work, we derive a general formula for exact particle-number projection after variation in the HFB approximation, assuming that the HFB Hamiltonian preserves time-reversal symmetry. This formula reduces to simpler known expressions in the HF and Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer (BCS) limits of the HFB. We apply this formula to calculate the thermodynamic quantities needed for level densities in the heavy nuclei $^{162}\mathrm{Dy}, ^{148}\mathrm{Sm}$, and $^{150}\mathrm{Sm}$. We find that the exact particle-number projection gives better physical results and is significantly more computationally efficient than the saddle-point methods. However, the fundamental limitations caused by broken symmetries in the mean-field approximation are still present.