What happens in the Hartree and Fock diagrams? I am trying to understand the Hartree and Fock diagram shown in the picture.
To understand it a assume there is an electron entering and leaving at the tail of the tadpole (Hartree diagram) and an electron entering and leaving at the edges of the Fock diagram.
If I were to guess the meaning of the diagrams I would say:
Hartree: An electron interacts with another electron, described by the circle, which first appears with some momentum and the suddenly disappear giving the momentum back to the first electron, and in the end no real change happened.
Fock: An electron enters, interacts with itself, (I do not understand the result of this self interacting) and then moves on, and in the end no real change happened.
I don't find it to suspicious that no real change is happening, this is just the way a particle is propagating.
I have no clue if these explanations are even close to the correct interpretation and would appreciate any help and input!
 A: *

*In Hartree term the time and the spatial position of the ends of circle line (representing Green's function) coincide. i.e. equal to $\langle \psi^\dagger (t,\mathbf{r}) \psi (t,\mathbf{r})=n(t,\mathbf{r})\rangle$, which is nothing else as an electron density. Therefore, Hartree diagram is basically the potential created by all other electrons that an incoming electron feels: $\int d^3 \mathbf{r}'V(\mathbf{r}-\mathbf{r}')n(\mathbf{r}')$. That's why is is called mean-free field approximation. This is classical term and neither diagrams nor quantum mechanics is needed to understand it.

*Fock, meanwhile, is a quantum correction to the mean-free field description. Since electron is a "probability cloud", i.e. not located in a single point of the space, the Green's function $\langle \psi^\dagger (t,\mathbf{r}) \psi (t,\mathbf{r}')\rangle$ in general is not zero even if $\mathbf{r}\ne \mathbf{r}'$, like in second diagram. It looks like, electron can interact with itself, but I think it's wrong. Accurate calculation shows that taking $t=t'$ the Green's function of a single electron ($+i0$ in denominator) is
$$
\int d\omega \frac{e^{+i0\omega}}{\omega-\epsilon_p+i0} =0
$$
where exponent comes from accurate work with time-ordering in Green's function: $\langle \psi^\dagger (t) \psi (t)\rangle=-\left.\langle T \psi (t)\psi^\dagger (t') \rangle\right|_{t'-t\to+0}$. Therefore the term is non zero only in the presence of other electrons.
Practically it leads to the correction of the electron dispersion relation, rather then to a new potential. But this is another story :)
[1] L. S. Levitov and A. V. Shytov, Green's functions. Theory and practice.
[2] A. A. Abrikosov , L. P. Gorkov , I. E. Dzyaloshinski, Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics
