A variational treatment of the periodic Anderson model with antiferromagnetic order

We discuss a variational ground state wave function for the symmetric periodic Anderson model with commensurate spin density order. The energy of this ansatz is evaluated in closed form. Our approach generalizes a variational treatment proposed recently by Strack and Vollhardt and results in significantly lower energy. Contrary to the Gutzwiller ansatz the wave function recovers the Schrieffer-Wolff limit for large Coulomb repulsion. We clarify the relation of our approach to unrestricted Hartree-Fock and present a comparison with existing quantum Monte Carlo calculations for one dimension.