The GW approximation for the electronic self-energy

Many-body perturbation theory is a well-established ab initio electronic-structure method based on Green functions. Although computationally more demanding than density functional theory, it has the distinct advantage that the exact expressions for all relevant observables, including the ground-state total energy, in terms of the Green function are known explicitly. The most important application, however, lies in the calculation of excited states, whose energies correspond directly to the poles of the Green function in the complex frequency plane. The accuracy of results obtained within this framework is only limited by the choice of the exchange-correlation self-energy, which must still be approximated in actual implementations. In this respect, the GW approximation has proved highly successful for systems governed by the Coulomb interaction. It yields band structures of solids, including the band gaps of semiconductors, as well as atomic and molecular ionization energies in very good quantitative agreement with experimental photoemission data.