Thermofield theory for finite-temperature quantum chemistry

Thermofield dynamics has proven to be a very useful theory in high-energy physics, particularly since it permits the treatment of both time- and temperature-dependence on an equal footing. We here show that it also has an excellent potential for studying thermal properties of electronic systems in physics and chemistry. We describe a general framework for constructing finite temperature correlated wave function methods typical of ground state methods. We then introduce two distinct approaches to the resulting imaginary time Schrödinger equation, which we refer to as fixed-reference and covariant methods. As an example, we derive the two corresponding versions of thermal configuration interaction theory and apply them to the Hubbard model, while comparing with exact benchmark results.