Effective potential theory centroid density

The diagrammatic representation of the centroid density enhances one s ability to approximately evaluate the full perturbation series [3]. For example, one can focus on a class of diagrams with the same topological characteristics. The sum of such a class results in a compact analytical expression that includes infinite terms in the summation. A very useful technique in such cases is the renormalization of diagrams [57,58]. This procedure can be applied to the vertices to define the effective potential theory diagrammatically [3, 21-23] and, in doing so, an accurate approximation to the centroid density [3]. 

It should be noted that these equations are to be solved for each position of the centroid q. The frequency in Eq. (2.27) is the same as the effective frequency obtained for the optimized LHO reference system using the path-integral centroid density version of the Gibbs-Bogoliubov variational method [1, pp. 303-307 2, pp. 86-96], Correspondingly, Eqs. (2.27) and (2.28) are exactly the same as those in the quadratic effective potential theory [1,21-23], The derivation above does not make use of the variational principle but, instead, is the result of the vertex renormalization procedure. The diagrammatic analysis thus provides a method of systematic identification and evaluation of the corrections to the variational theory [3],... 

One conclusion that can be reached from the early work on effective potentials [1,21-23], the work of Cao and Voth [3-8], as well as the centroid density-based formulation of quantum transition-state theory [42-44,49] is that the path centroid is a particularly useful variable in statistical mechanics about which to develop approximate, but quite accurate, quantum mechanical expressions and to probe the quantum-classical correspondence principle. It is in this spirit that a general centroid density-based formulation of quantum Boltzmann statistical mechanics is presented in the present section. This topic is the subject of Paper I, and the emphasis in this section is on analytic theory as opposed to computational approaches (cf. Sections III and IV). 

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