Optimized Rayleigh–Schrödinger expansion of the effective potential

An optimized Rayleigh–Schrödinger expansion scheme of solving the functional Schrödinger equation with an external source is proposed to calculate the effective potential beyond the Gaussian approximation. For a scalar field theory whose potential function has a Fourier representation in a sense of tempered distributions, we obtain the effective potential up to the second order, and show that the first-order result is just the Gaussian effective potential. Its application to the λφ4 field theory yields the same post-Gaussian effective potential as obtained in the functional integral formalism.