9.

2 The Variational Ground State 515

Figure 9.2: A pair of sites embedded in an effective medium characterized by the

wavefunction l\k(q)).

the surrounding correlated Fermi sea (Fig. 9.2). We have to force the
cluster to imitate, as closely as possible, the inside of a homogeneous
macroscopic system.
We try to achieve this by assigning amplitudes to cluster configura-
tions, which correspond to the recipe for constructing (Q!(q)).According
to (9.16),each time when a doubly occupied site appears, the amplitude
of the configuration picks up a factor 77. Constricting ourselves to the
case of a half-filled band, (9.7) applies. In each configuration, the num-
ber of doubly occupied sites must be equal to the number of empty sites
Nd = N,. This means that in (9.16), the same variational amplitudes
result if we associate a factor fi with each doubly occupied, and also
with each empty, site:

(9.30)

Symmetrizing the prescription in e and d does not make any difference

to the Gutzwiller Ansatz but simplifies the cluster procedure we are
considering: it automatically ensures that exact half-filling will be kept.
Let us envisage the following decomposition of the N-electron wave
function