The GW approximation (GWA) is an approximation made in order to calculate the self-energy of a many-body system of electrons.[1][2][3] The approximation is that the expansion of the self-energy Σ in terms of the single particle Green's function G and the screened Coulomb interaction W (in units of )
can be truncated after the first term:
In other words, the self-energy is expanded in a formal Taylor series in powers of the screened interaction W and the lowest order term is kept in the expansion in GWA.