9.

2 The Variational Ground State 51 1

For an easy demonstration of this fact, consider the expansion (9.22).

We introduce the correlation function which measures the probability
of the two electrons sitting a lattice vector G away:

1 /? 1 1 1 1’
8

eikl(g+<=) = 1 eiklG
= eiklg
eik2g eikz(g+G) 1 ,ikzG

= 2[1 - cos (kl - kz)G] (9.27)

(the occupation numbers are site-diagonal, therefore the expression con-
tains the squared absolute values of the determinants). The density-
density correlation has an oscillating character. For a more elaborate
example, cf. Problem 9.1.
One has to be careful about the terminology: the non-interacting
Fermi sea is, by definition, uncorrelated because the occupation numbers
for antiparallel-spin electrons are independent. Such is the nature of the
ground state of non-interacting electrons. As we have seen, this does not
imply that all intersite correlations should vanish: far from it! There
are appreciable spatial correlations for parallel-spin electrons. This is,
however, not caused by any interaction thus in our terminology, it is
not a correlation effect.
Now we are in the position to expand the trial state (9.16) in the
orthonormal basis (9.23)

(9.28)
A comparison of (9.24) and (9.28) allows us to reformulate the rea-
soning behind the Gutzwiller Ansatz: l@)is derived from (FS) by sys-