Dual fermion method as a prototype of generic reference-system approach for correlated fermions

We present a purely diagrammatic derivation of the dual fermion scheme (Rubtsov et al., 2008). The derivation makes particularly clear that a similar scheme can be developed for an arbitrary reference system provided it has the same interaction term as the original system. Thereby no restrictions are imposed by the locality of the reference problem or by the nature of the original problem as a lattice one. We present new arguments in favour of keeping the dual denominator in the expression for the lattice self-energy independently of the truncation of the dual interaction. As an example we present the computational results for the half-filled 2D Hubbard model with the choice of a 2 × 2 plaquette with periodic boundary conditions as a reference system. We observe that obtained results are in a good agreement with numerically exact lattice quantum Monte Carlo data. •Dual fermion theory is accurately derived from a weak-coupling diagrammatic expansion.•Generalization for an arbitrary reference system is straightforward.•Dual denominator in the self-energy is essential for any approximation of the theory.•Simple reference system of an isolated 2x2 cluster provides promising results.