Many-body orthogonal polynomial systems

The fundamental methods employed in the moment problem, involving orthogonal polynomial systems, the Lanczos algorithm, continued fraction analysis and Pade approximants has been combined with a cumulant approach and applied to the extensive many-body problem in physics. This has yielded many new exact results for many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit - for the ground state energy, for excited state gaps, for arbitrary ground state avenges - and are of a nonperturbative nature. These results flow from a confluence property of the three-term recurrence coefficients arising and define a general class of many-body orthogonal polynomials. These theorems constitute an analytical solution to the Lanczos algorithm in that they are expressed in terms of the three-term recurrence coefficients α and β. These results can also be applied approximately for non-solvable models in the form of an expansion, in a descending series of the system size. The zeroth order order this expansion is just the manifestation of the central limit theorem in which a Gaussian measure and hermite polynomials arise. The first order represents the first non-trivial order, in which classical distribution functions like the binomial distributions arise and the associated class of orthogonal polynomials are Meixner polynomials. Amongst examples of systems which have infinite order in the expansion are q-orthogonal polynomials where q depends on the system size in a particular way. (author)