The Green Function Cellular Method and its relation to multiple scattering theory

We investigate techniques for solving the wave equation which are based on the idea of obtaining exact local solutions within each potential cell, which are then joined to form a global solution. We derive full potential multiple scattering theory (MST) from the Lippmann-Schwinger equation and show that it as well as a closely related cellular method are techniques of this type. This cellular method appears to have all of the advantages of MST and the added advantage of having a secular matrix with only nearest neighbor interactions. Since this cellular method is easily linearized one can rigorously reduce electronic structure calculations to the problem of solving a nearest neighbor tight-binding problem.