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428 Ch.

8 Ferromagnetism in Hubbard Models

8.2.2 Flat-Band Ferromagnetism


Motivated by the finding of Lieb’s ferrimagnetism in systems for which
the U = 0 spectrum shows a dispersionless band at the centre of the
spectrum, we may ask what happens if a flat band lies at the bottom of
the spectrum. The reasonable expectation is ferromagnetism, at least
if N does not exceed the number of unit cells. A handwaving argument
could be the following: in the U = 0 ground state, the electrons populate
the dispersionless band, and the same energy is obtained for all possible
total spins including the case of full polarization S = N / 2 . Switching
on U ,the exchange hole effect will select the maximum-spin state as the
(essentially) unique ground state.
To see a specific example, let us consider the railroad trestle lattice
with Tasaki’s parametrization (4.78), and t’ = 0 (see Problem 4.3 on p.
167 and p. 190). Deleting the lines belonging to t’ in Fig. 4.5, we get a
“sawtooth lattice” which can be redrawn (see Fig. 8.2) as a linear chain
with hopping ZI, and a second-neighbour hopping t for the sublattice of
odd sites, while the even sites have a site energy 6.

c U € € €

Figure 8.2: The linear chain with nearest-neighbour hopping v, and a second-
neighbour hopping t for one of the sublattices. The other sublattice has the site
energy 6 .

For t > 0, the lower band is the dispersionless B-(Ic) = -24 which
is separated by a gap from the upper band E+(lc) = 2t cos Ic X2t. It +
can be proven that for U > 0, for N = L electrons, the ground state is
indeed a fully polarized ferromagnetg with S = N / 2 .
Looking at Fig. 8.2 we might become worried because the previous
finding seems to contradict a celebrated theorem by Lieb and Mattis
’In fact, it is an insulating ferromagnet: there is a gap even at U = 0 and it is
likely to increase when U is switched on. However, even though the exact proof does
not cover the case N < L, a large-U argument does (3231, and there seems to be no
doubt that metallic ferromagnetism will be found for a range of fillings.

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