Natural orbital functional theory and pairing correlation effects in electron momentum density

Occupation numbers of natural orbitals capture the physics of strong electron correlations in momentum space. A natural orbital density functional theory based on the antisymmetrized geminal product provides these occupation numbers and the corresponding electron momentum density. A practical implementation of this theo-ry approximates the natural orbitals by the Kohn-Sham orbitals and uses a mean-field approach to estimate pair-ing amplitudes leading to corrections for the independent particle model. The method is applied to weakly doped La2CuO4.