Slave-boson based configuration-interaction approach for the Hubbard model

Based on the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-boson scheme we develop a configuration-interaction (CI) approach which is suitable to improve the energy of symmetry-broken saddle-point solutions. The theory is applied to spin-polaron states in the Hubbard model and compared with analogous results obtained within the Hartree-Fock approximation. In addition we show that within the infinite ${\cal D}$ prescription of the Gutzwiller method a CI approach does not improve the variational result since in the thermodynamic limit matrix elements between different inhomogeneous states vanish due to an 'orthogonality catastrophe'.