536 Ch.

10 The Correlated Metallic State

going to meet correlated insulators with extremely narrow gaps. The

Zeeman energy in a field of, say, 10T may well turn out to be comparable
with such small energies, and thus the field may have a drastic influence
on the electronic structure. Strongly correlated systems often show an
interesting and complicated behaviour in magnetic field.
Vollhardt [431] noticed that switching on the magnetic field has a
similar effect as increasing U : it drives the system towards the fully
localized n d = 0 state (the field polarizes the electron spins, and parallel-
spin electrons cannot go to the same lattice site). Thus in a finite field,
a smaller U is sufficient to drive the system through a metal-insulator
transition. If the system is near the Brinkman-Rice transition, then
even small fields can have a drastic effect.
Let us see what happens when we approach the transition from the
metallic side. The first effect of increasing the field is a departure from
linearity in the magnetization curve. The lowest-order correction can
be described by introducing the third-order nonlinear susceptibility

m M X s +~X ( 3 ) ~ 3 . ( 10.17)

It is found that
(10.18)

(see the solution to Problem 10.1 for a derivation of this relationship).

Upon approaching the Brinkman-Rice transition, x(3)diverges like

( 10.19)
so that it quickly becomes very large, signalling a substantial deviation
from linearity. Furthermore, for U sufficiently near U,,,x ( ~is) positive,
i.e., the magnetization curve has a strong upward curvature. By going
beyond a power expansion in H , we find that (at least in a range of
U )the field can even cause a first-order transition: the system jumps
from a metallic state with a finite n d straight into the insulating state
which has n d = 0, and saturated magnetization. It is reassuring to find
that this metamagnetic transition is not an artefact of the Gutzwiller
approximation but a true feature of the Hubbard model: at very low
temperatures, evidence of a sharp metamagnetic transition was found
for the infinite-dimensional Hubbard model [231]. A simple demonstra-
tion of the metamagnetic behaviour is given in Problem 10.2.