Gutzwiller wave functions for correlated electrons: theory and applications

This work covers three lectures on Gutzwiller wave functions for correlated electron systems. In the first lecture, some basic ideas on model Hamiltonians and their motivation are outlined, Gutzwiller's variational approach to Landau Fermi-liquid theory is sketched, and, as a first application, the theory is applied to the one-band Hubbard model where the Brinkman-Rice metal-to-insulator transition is found. The second lecture is devoted to the perturbative calculation of expectation values. In this rather technical part the variational analog of Wick's theorem, Feynman diagrams, and the linked-cluster theorem are introduced. The important differences between the variational approach and the standard Green function technique are the absence of a time-dependence and the flexibility to select the expansion parameter of the variational perturbation theory. When this flexibility is used appropriately, not a single self-energy diagram must be calculated in the limit of large dimensions, i.e. in the limit of large lattice coordination number the expectation values can be evaluated exactly for general Hubbard-type models for all interaction strengths and band fillings. The third lecture covers the application of the theory to ferromagnetism of nickel. After a discussion of the nickel problem, multi-band Hubbard models and Gutzwiller wave functions are introduced and parameterized. The favourable comparison between the results from Gutzwiller theory and a large number of experiments shows that correlations play an important role in itinerant ferromagnets.