Study on the Accuracy of the Envelope Theory

Abstract

The envelope theory is an easy-to-use approximation method to obtain eigensolutions for some quantum many-body systems. Even if the solutions are reliable and an improvement procedure exists, the method can lack of accuracy for some systems. In a previous work, two hypotheses were proposed to explain the low precision: the presence of a divergence in the potential and a mix of variational characters. In the present work, different systems are studied to test these hypotheses. Theses tests show that the presence of a divergence causes indeed less accurate results, while the mix of variational characters reduces the impact of the improvement procedure.