A useful concept for finding numerically the dominant correlations of a given
ground state in an interacting quantum lattice system in an unbiased way is the
correlation density matrix. For two disjoint, separated clusters, it is defined
to be the density matrix of their union minus the direct product of their
individual density matrices and contains all correlations between the two
clusters. We show how to extract from the correlation density matrix a general
overview of the correlations as well as detailed information on the operators
carrying long-range correlations and the spatial dependence of their
correlation functions. To determine the correlation density matrix, we
calculate the ground state for a class of spinless extended Hubbard models
using the density matrix renormalization group. This numerical method is based
on matrix product states for which the correlation density matrix can be
obtained straightforwardly. In an appendix, we give a detailed tutorial
introduction to our variational matrix product state approach for ground state
calculations for 1- dimensional quantum chain models. We show in detail how
matrix product states overcome the problem of large Hilbert space dimensions in
these models and describe all techniques which are needed for handling them in
practice.Comment: 50 pages, 34 figures, to be published in New Journal of Physic