English

Notes on Wick's theorem in many-body theory

Mathematical Physics 2023-10-17 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons math.MP

Abstract

In this pedagogical note I present the operator form of Wick's theorem, i.e. a procedure to bring a product of 1-particle creation and destruction operators to normal order, with respect to some reference many-body state. Both the static and the time-ordered cases are presented. For the latter, in particular, I provide a simple proof.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.09248,
  title  = {Notes on Wick's theorem in many-body theory},
  author = {Luca Guido Molinari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09248},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

5 pages. Updated version with a new simple proof of Wick's theorem for time-ordered operators

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:25:24.092Z