Green functions in the renormalized many-body perturbation theory for correlated and disordered electrons

Abstract

The ways of introducing and handling renormalizations in the many-body perturbation theory are reviewed. We stress the indispensable role the technique of Green functions plays in extrapolating the weak-coupling perturbative approaches to intermediate and strong couplings. We separately discuss mass and charge renor- malizations. The former is incorporated in a self-consistent equation for the self-energy derived explicitly from generating Feynman diagrams within the Baym and Kadanoff approach. The latter amounts to self-consistent equations for two-particle irreducible vertices. We analyze the charge renormalization initiated by De Domi- nicis and Martin and demonstrate that its realization via the parquet approach may become a powerful and viable way of using the many-body diagrammatic approach reliably in non-perturbative regimes with coopera- tive phenomena induced by either strong interaction or strong static randomness. Electric and magnetic properties of solids are determined by the behavior of valence electrons weakly bound to the atoms forming the crystalline lattice. The behavior of the gas of valence electrons in solids is most profound in metals with an open Fermi surface. Conduction electrons in metals can be described in a number of situations and for various purposes quite accurately by Bloch waves, eigenstates of the Fermi-gas Hamiltonian. We know, however, that electrons even in metals are not a noninteracting gas. They are generally exposed to forces driving them out of the equilibrium state of the Fermi gas. Firstly, no metal is a pure crystal and hence the electrons do not move freely in space. They are scattered on randomly distributed impurities and lattice defects. Secondly, the electrons are neither free and their mutual repulsion cannot be neglected particularly for transition and heavy metals. It is the most important and long standing task of condensed-matter theorists to comprehend and qualitatively capture the deviations in the behavior of electrons in real metals from their idealized representation via Bloch waves. The problem with quantification of the behavior of electrons beyond the almost free-electron picture is in paucity of available tools for accomplishing this task. Even if we can reduce the description of the electron gas in metals to rather simple and generic models, we are unable to solve them exactly, except for a few limiting cases that mostly do not correspond to situations of physical interest. With the increasing power of modern computers the role of numerical solutions and numerical "brute force" approaches has increased. Numerical solutions are usually unbiased and can reach a rather high level of quantitative precision. In some aspects they substitute the missing exact analytic solutions. Numerical solutions are suitable and even indispensable in showing and displaying the trends and some global features of the models studied. They, however, fail in critical regions of phase transitions in the vicinity of singularities in correlation functions. In these