Cumulant Expansion and Wick's Theorem for Spins. Application to the Antiferromagnetic Ground State

A form of Wick's theorem is derived which is applicable to spin operators of arbitrary magnitude in a manner analogous to the decomposition of fermion and boson operator products. Use of the theorem together with Kubo's cumulant rearrangement of perturbation theory leads to a compact prescription for the calculation of the ground-state energy of spin systems. This method is parallel to Goldstone's linked-cluster expansion for fermions, but the expansion for spins, as well as for bosons, contains cumulant correction terms. The Green functions are shown to be expanded similarly in terms of cumulants. The method is illustrated by the calculation of the antiferromagnetic ground state, and circumvents the involved development in the previous work of Davis and Boon. It is found that our procedure gives better convergence than Davis's expansion and that Boon's final formulas as well as his numerical results contain some errors.