510 Ch.

9 The Gutzwiller Variational Method

a distinctive feature: a sharp Fermi surface. The existence of a sharp

Fermi surface is a k-space feature; it is not easily seen in the real-space
expansion (9.24). The determinant factors must “know about” the ex-
istence of the Fermi surface! They are complicated, inherently complex
quantities, expressing the relative phases of the localized configurations.
The expansion (9.24) highlights the basic difficulty of describing
strong local correlations in itinerant systems. Itinerancy is a k-space
feature, easily expressed in the Bloch-representation. Local correlations
are, on the other hand, best handled in the Wannier representation. To
include both aspects, one has to be able to go to and fro between the
two representations; for a many-electron system, this gets complicated.
The following argument should help to understand the relevance of
the determinant coefficients in (9.24). The same determinants would
appear in the Wannier representation of the ground state of a sea IFS),l
of N / 2 spinless fermions:

In the absence of orbital degeneracy, the Pauli principle prevents two

electrons from sharing the same site, so there is no on-site interaction
to speak about. Still, two fermions tend to keep away from each other:
due to the antisymmetrization implicit in (9.26), an exchange hole sur-
rounds each fermion (see Problem 9.1). The determinants in the above
equation can therefore be regarded as exchange hole factors. They ex-
press the fact that a configuration in which the fermions are more-or-less
evenly spaced, is much more probable than one in which the fermions
are crowded together. Similarly, in (9.24) the same determinant factors
describe the exchange hole effect for parallel-spin electrons. If you like,
you can say that certain spatial correlations are present even in the non-
interacting Fermi sea (FS),but these are due to statistics, and therefore
act only between particles with like quantum numbers (i.e., the same
spin).