9.

2 The Variational Ground State 517

a(aj3) = 1is justified in the limit of high-dimensional latticed2. It turns

out that, for many purposes, three dimensions is high enough.
Switching on U ,the amplitudes a ( @ ) pick up a variational factor
,/?j due to each d or e: thus a(d t) = Ji,a(de) = q, while a(5-t) remains
1. Table 9.1 gives a list of the amplitudes of all 16 configurations.

Table 9.1: The 16 cluster configurations, and their amplitudes a(&

I-+-
configuration
ee, ed, de, dd
amplitude

The total statistical weight for the cluster is

N = 4 ( 1 + q)' . (9.33)

hf serves as a normalization factor in the calculation of expectation

values. For instance, the density of doubly occupied sites, identified
with the probability of finding the site i in the configuration d, turns
out to be

Note that this yields correct limiting values: n d = 0 for q = 0, and

nd = 1/4 for q = 1.
We have to be a bit more circumspect in finding the cluster estimate
for the kinetic energy Eband(q). First, let us make it explicit that in
(9.1), we consider the band arising from nearest-neighbour hopping.
'*It must be mentioned that the cluster methods described in the literature
[332, 312, 1041 are much more sophisticated, inasmuch as they take into account the
exchange hole effect within the cluster, and can be adapted to any finite dimension.
Clusters with more than two sites give more satisfactory results [104].