556 Ch.

10 The Correlated Metallic State

we followed in constructing (9.16). Let us reformulate the Gutzwiller

wavefunction as

(10.42)

Thus the idea was to decompose the Fermi sea into localized configura-
tions, and weight these according to the interaction energy. Baeriswyl
[34] suggested that the large-ll insulating state can be sought by starting
from the opposite limit: take the ground state which belongs to infinite
interaction, decompose it into k-space configurations, and weight these
according to the band energy:

(10.43)

where C is a variational parameter.

There is an obvious difficulty with constructing the Baeriswyl state:
while IQu=o)is immediately known, I Q U = ~ )is not. To date, explicit
use of (10.43) has been confined to models where the fully Gutzwiller
projected Fermi sea (9.29) can be used as the U -+ 00 ground state: it
is a surprisingly good approximation in the case of the D = 1 Hubbard
model [137], and it is exact for the 1/r Hubbard chain. Since the latter
model provides particularly valuable insight into the workings of the
variational method, we review the pertinent results in some detail.

Problem 10.5 Introducing the Baeriswyl state (10.43) permits a simple

derivation of the results of the large-U expansion. Work out the 1/U-corrections
to the ground state energy.

10.6.3 Digression: The 1/r Hubbard Chain

We should be troubled by the following consideration: We are seeking
an accurate variational ground state of the Hubbard model at n = 1
for arbitrary U ,with the eventual aim of understanding the Mott tran-
sition. However, if we really succeeded in this pursuit, we should not
see a Mott transition at all! We have been studying the Hubbard model
with nearest-neighbour hopping on hypercubic lattices; these are char-
acterized by the perfect nesting property (7.49), and we are quite certain