Accurate calculation of ground-state energies in an analytic Lanczos expansion

Abstract

An analysis of a general non-perturbative technique for calculating ground-state properties of extensive lattice many-body systems is presented, in order to extract accurate numerical values characterizing the ground-state spectrum. This technique, the plaquette expansion, employs an expansion about the thermodynamic limit of the coefficients that are generated by the Lanczos process. For the ground-state energy this error analysis, using theorems on the error bounds for the Lanczos method and the truncation in the plaquette expansion, allows for an accurate estimate when the approximation is taken to a given order. As an example we analyse the one-dimensional antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model, and find that the best ground-state energy density is within of the exact value, although the systematic error is . We also find, for this model, systematic improvement with each new order included in the expansion and have not observed any asymptotic tendencies. At equivalent orders of truncation we achieve far better results than for the other moment methods, such as the t-expansion or the connected-moment expansion.