Many-Body Vacuum Diagrams and Their Recursive Graphical Construction

Abstract

The grand-canonical potential of many-body physics can be considered as a functional of the interaction-free correlation function. As such it obeys a nonlinear functional differential equation which can be turned into a recursion relation. This is solved graphically order by order in the two-particle interaction to find all connected vacuum diagrams with their proper weights. As a special case, the procedure is applied to generate the Hugenholtz diagrams for a weakly interacting Bose gas.