Variation principle has been developed to calculate many-particle effects in crystals. Within the framework of quasi-particle concept the variation principle has been used to find one-electron states with taking into account of effects due to non-locality of electronic density functional in electromagnetic fields. A secondary quantized density matrix was used to find the Green function of a quasiparticle and changes of its effective mass due to correlated motion of interacting electrons.
Variation principle has been developed to calculate many-particle effects in crystals. Within the framework of quasi-particle concept the variation principle has been used to find one-electron states with taking into account of effects due to non-locality of electronic density functional in electromagnetic fields. A secondary quantized density matrix was used to find the Green function of a quasiparticle and changes of its effective mass due to correlated motion of interacting electrons.
A variational formulation for the calculation of interacting fermion systems based on the density-matrix functional theory is presented. Our formalism provides for a natural integration of explicit many-particle effects into standard density-functional-theory-based calculations and it avoids the ambiguities of double-counting terms inherent in other approaches. Like the dynamical mean-field theory, we employ a local approximation for explicit correlations. Aiming at the ground state only, we trade some of the complexity of Green's-function-based many-particle methods against efficiency. Using short Hubbard chains as test systems, we demonstrate that the method captures ground-state properties, such as left-right correlation, beyond those accessible by mean-field theories.
We propose a new, alternative method for ab-initio calculations of the electronic structure of solids, which has been specifically adapted to treat many-body effects in a more rigorous way than many existing ab-initio methods. We start from a standard band-structure calculation for an effective one-particle Hamiltonian approximately describing the material of interest. This yields a suitable set of one-particle basis functions, from which well localized Wannier functions can be constructed using a method proposed by Marzari and Vanderbilt. Within this (minimal) basis of localized Wannier functions the matrix elements of the non-interacting (one-particle) Hamiltonian as well as the Coulomb matrix elements can be calculated. The result is a many-body Hamiltonian in second quantization with parameters determined from first principles calculations for the material of interest. The Hamiltonian is in the form of a multi-band Hamiltonian in second quantization (a kind of extended, multi-band Hubbard model) such that all the standard many-body methods can be applied. We explicitly show how this approach can be solved in the simplest many-body approximation, the mean-field Hartree-Fock approximation (HFA), which takes into account exact exchange and corrects for self-interaction effects.
We propose a framework to construct the ground-state energy and density matrix of an N-electron system by solving a self-consistent set of single-particle equations. The method can be viewed as a nontrivial extension of the Kohn-Sham scheme (which is embedded as a special case). It is based on separating the Green's function into a quasiparticle part and a background part, and expressing only the background part as a functional of the density matrix. The calculated single-particle energies and wave functions have a clear physical interpretation as quasiparticle energies and orbitals.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary. Pablo Picasso Summary Condensed matter is constituted by a huge number of electrons and nuclei interacting with Coulomb potentials. The topic of this chapter is a way to deal with the full, coupled problem by separating it into a part that is tractable and the rest that is approximated. This naturally leads to the appearance of dynamical fields, and to the concept of “quasi-particles” that have the same quantum numbers as non-interacting electrons. The quasi-particles obey equations where the potential and bare interactions in the hamiltonian are replaced by dynamical self-energies and screened interactions that can describe many of the effects of correlation. In this chapter we discuss the intuitive concepts behind this approach in general terms to motivate the more rigorous formulations and approximations used in the Green's function methods of the following chapter and in Part III. The first equations of this book, Eqs. (1.1) and (1.2), express the fundamental theory of matter in terms of electrons and nuclei that interact with Coulomb potentials. For systems with only a few electrons, a solution of the problem can be obtained by exact diagonalization, using configuration interaction methods. For many-electron systems one has to resort to other methods. For example, QMC stochastic simulations (Chs. 22–25) are among the most accurate methods known to calculate certain expectation values, such as equilibrium thermodynamic properties, total energies, the density, and various static correlation functions like those in Ch. 5. Other properties such as excitation spectra are more difficult to access with QMC. Straightforward perturbation theory is, in general, not appropriate since interactions among the electrons are of the same order of magnitude as the independent-particle terms. Hence, we must develop other approaches. One strategy that gives access to equilibrium thermodynamic as well as dynamical excitation properties is to separate the interacting many-body problem into a part that is tractable by some means and the rest of the problem that is dealt with more approximately. The present chapter is devoted to this idea. It is a prelude to many-body Green's function methods; the aim is to provide a unified framework for the developments in Chs. 8–21, along with a qualitative description of the most relevant quantities.
To avoid confusion, it is necessary to be quite explicit about what is assumed and what is to be proved. A. Klein, Phys. Rev. 121, 950 (1961) Summary The topic of this chapter is functionals that provide a concise formulation for thermodynamic quantities and Green's function methods in interacting many-body systems. Building upon the instructive examples of density functional theory and the Hartree– Fock approximation, functionals of the Green's function are developed to provide a framework for practical methods used extensively in many-body perturbation theory (Chs. 9–15), dynamical mean-field theory (Chs. 16–20), and their combination in Ch. 21. Functional concepts give a firm foundation for those methods, for example, they give the conditions for approximations to obey conservation laws. Additional background and specific aspects are in App. H. Many physical quantities can be expressed as functionals , i.e., they depend on an entire function.1 For example, in the quantum variational method to determine a wavefunction, the total energy of a system of many electrons is a functional of a many-body trial wavefunction ( r 1 , r 2 , …): it is the expectation value of the hamiltonian. At the variational minimum, assuming the trial wavefunction is completely flexible, one finds the many-body Schrödinger equation for the ground state. Many of the properties we are interested in are, formally, simple functionals of the ground- or excited-state wavefunctions. In the search for feasible ways to calculate properties such as excitation spectra, we are led to different types of functional. The idea is to deal only with a physical, measurable quantity Q of interest and a variational functional E [ Q ] of this quantity. The variational character of E allows one to derive equations that determine Q 0 , the value of Q for the system in a desired state, typically the ground state or equilibrium state at T ≠ 0. Other properties should be different functionals F m [ Q ] that can then be evaluated at Q = Q 0 . This strategy is outlined in Fig. 8.1. To appreciate the power of such approaches, one can consider the impact of density functional theory, which is formulated as a functional of the density n ( r ) of electrons; it is defined for a range of densities and the variational minimum for the energy functional E [ n ] leads to equations to determine the actual ground-state density n 0 ( r ) and total energy E 0 .
The equilibrium state of a system consisting of a large number of strongly interacting electrons can be characterized by its density operator. This gives a direct access to the ground-state energy or, at finite temperatures, to the free energy of the system as well as to other static physical quantities. Elementary excitations of the system, on the other hand, are described within the language of Green's functions, i.e. time- or frequency-dependent dynamic quantities which give a direct access to the linear response of the system subjected to a weak time-dependent external perturbation. A typical example is angle-revolved photoemission spectroscopy which is linked to the single-electron Green's function. Since usually both, the static as well as the dynamic physical quantities, cannot be obtained exactly for lattice fermion models like the Hubbard model, one has to resort to approximations. Opposed to more ad hoc treatments, variational principles promise to provide consistent and controlled approximations. Here, the Ritz principle and a generalized version of the Ritz principle at finite temperatures for the static case on the one hand and a dynamical variational principle for the single-electron Green's function or the self-energy on the other hand are introduced, discussed in detail and compared to each other to show up conceptual similarities and differences. In particular, the construction recipe for non-perturbative dynamic approximations is taken over from the construction of static mean-field theory based on the generalized Ritz principle. Within the two different frameworks, it is shown which types of approximations are accessible, and their respective weaknesses and strengths are worked out. Static Hartree-Fock theory as well as dynamical mean-field theory are found as the prototypical approximations.