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arXiv:cond-mat/0007282 · Physical Review C

Variational perturbation scheme for many-particle systems in the functional integral approach

Sang Koo You, Chul-Kyu Kim, Kyun Nahm, Hyun Sik Noh

Published Sep 1, 2000• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A variational perturbation theory based on the functional integral approach is formulated for many-particle systems. Using the variational action obtained through Jensen-Peierls' inequality, a perturbative expansion scheme for the thermodynamic potential is established. A modified Wick's theorem is obtained for the variational perturbation expansions. This theorem allows one to carry out systematic calculations of higher order terms without worrying about the double counting problem. A model numerical calculation was carried out on a nucleon gas system interacting through the Yukawa-type potential to test the efficiency of the present method.

DOI
10.1103/physrevc.62.045503

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A variational perturbation theory based on the functional integral approach is formulated for many-particle systems. Using the variational action obtained through Jensen-Peierls' inequality, a perturbative expansion scheme for the thermodynamic potential is established. A modified Wick's theorem is obtained for the variational perturbation expansions. This theorem allows one to carry out systematic calculations of higher order terms without worrying about the double counting problem. A model numerical calculation was carried out on a nucleon gas system interacting through the Yukawa-type potential to test the efficiency of the present method.
The efficiency of the variational perturbation theory (You et al 2000 Phys. Rev. C 62 045503) formulated recently for many-particle systems is examined by calculating the ground state correlation energy of the 3D electron gas with the Coulomb interaction. The perturbation beyond a variational result can be carried out systematically by the modified Wick's theorem which defines a contraction rule about the renormalized perturbation. Utilizing the theorem, variational ring diagrams of the electron gas are summed. As a result, the correlation energy is found to be much closer to the result of the Green function Monte Carlo calculation than that of the conventional ring approximation.
A variational method is developed for calculating the thermodynamic potential of quantum-mechanical many-body systems with pair-wise interactions. The method is based on Peierls' theorem and yields an upper bound to the thermodynamic potential density in the limit of an infinite system. Evaluation and minimization of the bound involves solution of a set of coupled nonlinear integral equations for the distribution function of elementary excitations and for functions defining a unitary transformation from bare particles to elementary excitations. Application of the theory to the BCS model of superconductivity reproduces the BCS results, and application to a degenerate imperfect Bose gas gives equations which are shown to be equivalent to those of Tolmachev and Wentzel.
We present a functional-integral method that is suitable for obtaining nonperturbative solutions to the partition function of fermion systems. The density matrix is cast as an expansion about the classical path contributions, and the quantum corrections can be calculated systematically by using retarded propagators in the space holomorphic functions. It is shown that the semiclassical expansion amounts to a high-temperature expansion, where the first nonvanishing quantum correction is of O(${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\beta}}}^{2}$). Each term of the semiclassical expansion may contain the coupling parameter in all orders of perturbation theory. The method can also be extended to boson systems.
This chapter considers a general form of the Wick’s theorem, which leads to a perturbation expansion of the (contour) single- and two-particle Green’s functions, which are expressed in terms of the contour time-ordering operator. The strategy for proving the Wick’s theorem is similar to that adopted within the Matsubara formalism for the Green’s functions at finite temperature and relies on the Gibbs form of the statistical operator in the interaction picture. An extension to superfluid Bose and Fermi systems is also considered.
A self-contained pedagogical introduction to the functional Schrödinger picture method of many-body theory is given at a level suitable for graduate students and also for many-body physicists who have not been exposed to the functional Schrödinger picture method previously. Mathematical tools necessary for the functional Schrödinger picture calculation are introduced. The method is first applied to various condensed matter problems including the electron gas, the Hubbard model, the BCS superconductivity, and dilute bose gas within the variational approximation. It is shown that the variational approximation with the Gaussian trial functional invariably leads into the Hartree-Fock results for both zero and finite temperature cases. In order to go beyond the Gaussian results, concepts of variational and optimized perturbation theories are introduced using simple quantum mechanical languages. Then, the variational perturbation theory in the functional Schrödinger picture is applied to the λϕ4λϕ^4λϕ4 model to yield the effective potential to the third order. The optimized perturbation theory is also applied to the λϕ4λϕ^4λϕ4 model to yield a general expression up to the second order.
In this paper, four distinct ideas are combined, which under a wide range of circumstances can give very rapidly converging series expansions for functional integrals. (1) Expansion of the functional being integrated in functional Taylor series. In the familiar case arising in quantum statistical mechanics, that of the Wiener integral of exp[−∫V(x(t))dt],V(x) being the perturbing potential, this is equivalent to expanding the characteristic functional of the probability functional of V(x(t)) in central moments of V(x(t)). The lowest-order term of the series is the approximation obtained by Feynman and Hibbs through a variational method. (2) Transfer of the harmonic term of the potential, when the functional integral is the quantum-statistical density matrix (Green's function of the Bloch equation), to the weighting function. This transforms the functional integral from a Wiener to an Uhlenbeck-Ornstein integral. The formal expressions for the terms of the expansion are somewhat more complicated, but they can be worked out, and the result is a great improvement in the speed of convergence of the series with decreasing temperature and/or decreasing relative magnitude of the anharmonic part of the potential. (3) ``Reservation of variables'' in the integration. This amounts to breaking the averaging process down into an average over subsets of the distributed random function (conditional average), followed by an averaging of these averages. Any step of this kind (it may be repeated within the subsets, etc.) gives an improvement of accuracy. (4) When the quantity being evaluated through functional integration is the partition function, the device introduced by Feynman and Hibbs, of interchanging the functional integration with the integration of the Green's function over the equated initial and final configuration-space points, may be combined with the above techniques. This eliminates one integration in the terms of the expansion and seems to improve accuracy at the same time. The general series obtained is correlated with more conventional operator techniques of quantum-mechanical perturbation theory, in order to answer the perennial question, does the path-integral method bring with it anything that could not be derived by other methods? It is in some sense a Feynman-Dyson expansion of the Green's function, but one that is further modified mathematically in a way characteristic only of the path-integral point of view, and which, moreover, improves its accuracy. It thus appears unlikely that the result is merely one of standard type disguised as a functional integral result. Sample numerical calculations are given to assay the accuracy of the methods, which are shown to compare very favorably with the traditional approximation of finite subdivision of the time interval.