New formalism for determining excitation spectra of many-body systems

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Abstract
We present a new general formalism for determining the excitation spectrum of interacting many-body systems. The basic assumption is that the number of the excitations is equal to the number of sites. Within this approximation, it is shown that the density-density response functions with two different pure-imaginary energies determine the excitation spectrum. The method is applied to the valence electrons of sodium clusters of differing sizes in the time-dependent local-density approximation (TDLDA). A jellium-sphere background model is used for the ion cores. The excitation spectra obtained in this way represent well the excitation spectra given by the full TDLDA calculation along the real energy axis. Important collective modes are reproduced very well.