Many-body wave functions approximated by the superposition of spin-projected nonorthogonal Slater determinants in the resonating Hartree-Fock method

A resonating Hartree-Fock (Res-HF) method is revisited and improved by the complete spin projection for the interacting Fermion system. This method approximates a many-body wave function by the superposition of nonorthogonal Slater determinants (S-dets). The nonorthogonality of the S-dets makes it possible to describe the large quantum fluctuations efficiently, since each S-det naturally includes the full-electron-excitation effects from other S-dets. The molecular orbitals in every S-det, as well as the superposition coefficients, are variationally determined. So far, however, the spin contamination, caused by the conventional half-projection, has been a serious obstacle to obtain the accurate wave functions for large-size fermion systems, especially in the intermediate and large correlation regimes. In this paper, we apply the complete spin projection method to the Res-HF calculations. As an example, the improved Res-HF method is applied to the one-dimensional Hubbard model. It will be shown that the complete spin projection improves the Res-HF wave functions significantly. In fact, the correlation energies explained by the improved Res-HF method are better than those by the variational Monte Carlo method in all the correlation regimes. The correlation structures at arbitrary fillings are also well described by the improved Res-HF method.