Quantum distributions formal solutions

Much of the recent literature on RDM reconstruction functionals is couched in terms of cumulant decompositions [13, 27-38]. Insofar as the p-RDM represents a quantum mechanical probability distribution for p-electron subsystems of an M-electron supersystem, the RDM cumulant formalism bears much similarity to the cumulant formalism of classical statistical mechanics, as formalized long ago by by Kubo [39]. (Quantum mechanics introduces important differences, however, as we shall discuss.) Within the cumulant formalism, the p-RDM is decomposed into connected and unconnected contributions, with the latter obtained in a known way from the lower-order -RDMs, q < p. The connected part defines the pth-order RDM cumulant (p-RDMC). In contrast to the p-RDM, the p-RDMC is an extensive quantity, meaning that it is additively separable in the case of a composite system composed of noninteracting subsystems. (The p-RDM is multiphcatively separable in such cases [28, 32]). The implication is that the RDMCs, and the connected equations that they satisfy, behave correctly in the limit of noninteracting subsystems by construction, whereas a 2-RDM obtained by approximate solution of the CSE may fail to preserve extensivity, or in other words may not be size-consistent [40, 42]. 

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