Projected quasiparticle perturbation theory

The BCS and/or Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theories are extended by treating the effect of four quasiparticle states perturbatively. The approach is tested on the pairing Hamiltonian, showing that it combines the advantage of standard perturbation theory, valid at low pairing strength, and of nonperturbative approaches breaking the particle number, valid at higher pairing strength. Including the restoration of particle number further improves the description of pairing correlation. In the presented test, the agreement between the exact solution and the combined perturbative plus projection is almost perfect. The proposed method scales friendly when the number of particles increases and provides a simple alternative to other more complicated approaches.