COMPARISON OF VARIATIONAL APPROACHES FOR THE EXACTLY SOLVABLE 1/R-HUBBARD CHAIN

We study Hartree-Fock, Gutzwiller, Baeriswyl, and combined Gutzwiller-Baeriswyl wave functions for the exactly solvable one-dimensional 1/r-Hubbard model. We find that none of these variational wave functions is able to correctly reproduce the physics of the metal-to-insulator transition which occurs in the model for half-filled bands when the interaction strength equals the bandwidth. The many-particle problem to calculate the variational ground state energy for the Baeriswyl and combined Gutzwiller-Baeriswyl wave function is exactly solved for the 1/r-Hubbard model. The latter wave function becomes exact both for small and large interaction strength, but it incorrectly predicts the metal-to-insulator transition to happen at infinitely strong interactions. It is thus seen that neither Hartree-Fock nor an energetically excellent Jastrow-type wave function yield a reliable prediction on the zero temperature phase transition in the one-dimensional 1/r-Hubbard chain.