506 Ch.

9 The Gutzwiller Variational Method

Fermi sea IFS), and uniformly diminishes the concentration of doubly

occupied sites. At 7 = 1, lQ) = IFS), thus 7 = 1 must correspond to
U = 0. For U > 0, we should find q < 1. The way the variational Ansatz
(9.16) works is this: whenever a site j is found to be doubly occupied,
the amplitude is multiplied by 7 ; while if the site is not doubly occupied,
the local Fermi sea structure remains unchanged. Configurations with
a lot of doubly occupied sites accumulate a lot of 7 < 1 factors, and get
suppressed. The resulting many-electron state will have a diminished
n d < 1/4 concentration of doubly occupied sites.
It is obvious that the same kind of correlated metallic trial ground
state can be introduced for any band filling, not just half-filling. What
is special about half-filling is that there a Mott transition is expexted
to occur, while away from half-filling, the ground is conducting even at
U = 00. Thus the trial state (9.16) should have an even greater range of
applicability than in the non-half-filled case. To avoid having to repeat
the same steps again, henceforth we consider a general band filling:
N electrons distributed over L lattice sites. Half-filling corresponds to
N = L. We usually assume N 5 L since for bipartite lattices, the
physics at N > L is simply related to that at N < L (see Sec. 4.5).
Because we restrict the discussion to non-magnetic states, there will be
N / 2 electrons with f-spin, and N / 2 electrons with &-spin.
To find the optimum degree of polarity fluctuations, we have to
calculate the ground state energy density

and minimize it with respect to q. This we will do in several steps.

9.2.1 The Gutzwiller Trial State

To be able to count the doubly occupied sites, we have to express the
ground state lQ) in real space. To gain experience, we start with the
uncorrelated Fermi sea ground state IFS), by expressing the Bloch op-
erators in terms of Warinier operators

(9.18)