8.

1 Preliminary Overview 423

certainly help for any lattice structure, and it may (at least in cer-
tain regions) push forward the FM phase boundary quite substantially.
Furthermore, extending the treatment to degenerate models, we can
introduce Hund’s coupling which may provide a vigorous, structure-
insensitive mechanism of itinerant ferromagnetism. Apparently, there
are several different routes to get FM in lattice fermion models; we do
not know yet whether we will pick out one of these as the essential
model of itinerant ferromagnetism, or the canonical model will rely on
a combination of them.

8.1.1 The Low-Density Limit

It was pointed out by Kanamori [201] that the mean field criteria (7.24)
and (7.45) overestimate the effect of a large U. To see why this must
be the case, one can argue as follows: The ground state energy is deter-
mined by the competition of U with the kinetic energy which is mea-
sured by the bandwidth W . In order to keep the energy cost of doubly
occupied sites as low as possible, the system sacrifices a certain frac-
tion AEkin of the kinetic energy. It is reasonable to claim that AEkjn
gives a measure of the effective interaction strength UeE. The biggest

gether; then AEki, -

kinetic energy sacrifice is made when the electrons stop moving alto-
W . Thus the effective interaction cannot be
greater than an energy of the order of the bandwidth: Ueff 5 f ( n ) - W ,
where the form of f ( n ) is determined by the band density of states. The
solution of the two-electron problem [201, 2641 makes it clear that the
Ueffintroduced here determines the energy splitting between high-spin
and low-spin states, thus it is plausible that it should replace U in an
improved version of the Stoner criterion:
Ueff * P(EF) = 1 (8.1)
Using the Kanamori criterion (8.1) instead of the Stoner criterion (7.24)
makes a lot of difference when the latter would require that U be much
bigger than W . Such is the case in the low-density limit of three-
dimensional systems where ~ ( E F vanishes
) like n1/3.Ueff cannot diverge
and it follows that ferromagnetism is suppressed if the band filling is

-
smaller than some critical value n,<,. The detailed calculation shows
that the threshold value is quite sizeable (n,<, 0.16-0.2).