Partial self-consistency and analyticity in many-body perturbation theory: Particle number conservation and a generalized sum rule

We consider a general class of approximations which guarantees the conservation of particle number in many-body perturbation theory. To do this we extend the concept of derivability for the self-energy to a larger class of diagrammatic terms in which only some of the Green’s function lines contain the fully dressed Green’s function G. We call the corresponding approximations for partially derivable. A special subclass of such approximations, which are gauge invariant, is obtained by dressing loops in the diagrammatic expansion of consistently with G. These approximations are number conserving but do not have to fulfill other conservation laws, such as the conservation of energy and momentum. From our formalism we can easily deduce whether commonly used approximations will fulfill the continuity equation, which implies particle number conservation. We further show how the concept of partial derivability plays an important role in the derivation of a generalized sum rule for the particle number, which reduces to the Luttinger-Ward theorem in the case of a homogeneous electron gas, and the Friedel sum rule in the case of the Anderson model. To do this we need to ensure that the Green’s function has certain complex analytic properties, which can be guaranteed if the spectral function is positive-semidefinite. The latter property can be ensured for a subset of partially -derivable approximations for the self-energy, namely those that can be constructed from squares of so-called half diagrams. For the case in which the analytic requirements are not fulfilled we highlight a number of subtle issues related to branch cuts, pole structure, and multivaluedness. We also show that various schemes of computing the particle number are consistent for particle number conserving approximations.