Bethe-salpeter equation from many-body perturbation theory

The Green function formalism is a powerful tool to calculate not only electronic structure within the quasi-particle (QP) picture, but it also gives access to optical absorption spectra. Starting from QP energies within the GW method, the polarizability, as central quantity, is calculated from the solution of a Bethe-Salpeter-like equation (BSE). It is usually solved within the Tamm-Dancoff Approximation (TDA) which neglects the coupling of resonant (positive frequency branch) and anti-resonant (negative frequency branch) excitations. In this work we solve the full BSE (beyond TDA) based on self-consistently calculated QP orbitals and energies for typical systems. The dielectric function is averaged over many low dimensional shifted k-meshes to obtain k-point converged results. We compare the results to recently introduced approximation to the BSE kernel. Additionally, the time-evolution ansatz is employed to calculate the polarizability, which avoids the direct solution of the BSE.