Physical and unphysical regimes of self-consistent many-body perturbation theory

Abstract

In the standard framework of self-consistent many-body perturbation theory, the skeleton series for the self-energy is truncated at a finite order N and plugged into the Dyson equation, which is then solved for the propagator $G_N$. We consider two examples of fermionic models, the Hubbard atom at half filling and its zero space-time dimensional simplified version. First, we show that $G_N$ converges when $N\to∞$ to a limit $G_∞\,$, which coincides with the exact physical propagator $G_{exact}$ at small enough coupling, while $G_∞ ≠ G_{exact}$ at strong coupling. This follows from the findings of [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 156402 (2015)] and an additional subtle mathematical mechanism elucidated here. Second, we demonstrate that it is possible to discriminate between the $G_∞=G_{exact}$ and $G_∞≠G_{exact}$ regimes thanks to a criterion which does not require the knowledge of $G_{exact}$, as proposed in [Phys. Rev. B 93, 161102 (2016)].