We construct a class of exact ground states for correlated electrons on pentagon chains in the high density region and discuss their physical properties. In this procedure the Hamiltonian is first cast in a positive semidefinite form using composite operators as a linear combination of creation operators acting on the sites of finite blocks. In the same step, the interaction is also transformed to obtain terms which require for their minimum eigenvalue zero at least one electron on each site. The transformed Hamiltonian matches the original Hamiltonian through a nonlinear system of equations whose solutions place the deduced ground states in restricted regions of the parameter space. In the second step, nonlocal product wave functions in position space are constructed. They are proven to be unique ground states which describe non-saturated ferromagnetic and correlated half metallic states. These solutions emerge when the strength of the Hubbard interaction Ui is site-dependent inside the unit cell. In the deduced phases, the interactions tune the bare dispersive band structure such to develop an effective upper flat band. We show that this band flattening effect emerges for a broader class of chains and is not restricted to pentagon chains. For the characterization of the deduced solutions, uniqueness proofs, exact ground state expectation values for long-range hopping amplitudes and correlation functions are also calculated. The study of physical reasons which lead to the appearance of ferromagnetism has revealed a new mechanism for the emergence of an ordered phase, described here in detail. This works as follows: starting from a completely dispersive bare band structure, the interactions quench the kinetic energy, hence the ordered phase is obtained solely by a drastic decrease of the interaction energy. Since Ui are site dependent, this determinative decrease is obtained by a redistribution of the double occupancy di such to attain small di where the on-site Coulomb repulsion Ui is high, and vice versa. The kinetic energy quench leads to the upper effective flat band, whose role is to enhance by its degeneracy the switching to the ordered phase dictated and stabilized by the interactions present. It is shown that for this phenomenon to occur, a given degree of complexity is needed for the chain, and the mechanism becomes inactive when the Ui interactions are homogeneous, or are missing from the ground state wave function.
We construct exact ground states of interacting electrons on triangle and diamond Hubbard chains. The construction requires (i) a rewriting of the Hamiltonian into positive semidefinite form, (ii) the construction of a many-electron ground state of this Hamiltonian, and (iii) the proof of the uniqueness of the ground state. This approach works in any dimension, requires no integrability of the model, and only demands sufficiently many microscopic parameters in the Hamiltonian which have to fulfill certain relations. The scheme is first employed to construct exact ground state for the diamond Hubbard chain in a magnetic field. These ground states are found to exhibit a wide range of properties such as flat-band ferromagnetism and correlation induced metallic, half-metallic or insulating behavior, which can be tuned by changing the magnetic flux, local potentials, or electron density. Detailed proofs of the uniqueness of the ground states are presented. By the same technique exact ground states are constructed for triangle Hubbard chains and a one-dimensional periodic Anderson model with nearest-neighbor hybridization. They permit direct comparison with results obtained by variational techniques for f-electron ferromagnetism due to a flat band in CeRh3B2.
Using a positive semidefinite operator technique we deduce exact ground states for a zig-zag hexagon chain described by a non-integrable Hubbard model with on-site repulsion. Flat bands are not present in the bare band structure, and the operators , introducing the electrons into the ground state, are all extended operators and confined in the quasi-1D chain structure of the system. Consequently, by increasing the number of carriers, the operators become connected, i.e. touch each other on several lattice sites. Hence the spin projection of the carriers becomes correlated in order to minimize the ground-state energy by reducing as much as possible the double occupancy leading to a ferromagnetic ground state. This result demonstrates in exact terms in a many-body frame that the conjecture made at the two-particle level by G. Brocks et al., [Phys. Rev. 93 (2004) p.146405.] that the Coulomb interaction is expected to stabilize correlated magnetic ground states in acenes, is clearly viable, and opens up new directions in the search for routes in obtaining organic ferromagnetism. Due to the itinerant nature of the obtained ferromagnetic ground state, the systems under discussion may also have direct application possibilities in spintronics.
The noninteracting electronic structures of tight-binding models on bipartite lattices with unequal numbers of sites in the two sublattices have a number of unique features, including the presence of spatially localized eigenstates and flat bands. When a uniform on-site Hubbard interaction
U is turned on, Lieb proved rigorously that at half-filling ($\ensuremath{\rho}=1$) the ground state has a nonzero spin. In this paper we consider a ``
CuO2 lattice'' (also known as ``Lieb lattice,'' or as a decorated square lattice), in which ``
d orbitals'' occupy the vertices of the squares, while ``
p orbitals'' lie halfway between two
d orbitals; both
d and
p orbitals can accommodate only up to two electrons. We use exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo (DQMC) simulations to quantify the nature of magnetic order through the behavior of correlation functions and sublattice magnetizations in the different orbitals as a function of
U and temperature; we have also calculated the projected density of states, and the compressibility. We study both the homogeneous (H) case,
Ud=Up, originally considered by Lieb, and the inhomogeneous (IH) case, ${U}_{d}\ensuremath{\ne}{U}_{p}$. For the H case at half-filling, we found that the global magnetization rises sharply at weak coupling, and then stabilizes towards the strong-coupling (Heisenberg) value, as a result of the interplay between the ferromagnetism of like sites and the antiferromagnetism between unlike sites; we verified that the system is an insulator for all
U. For the IH system at half-filling, we argue that the case ${U}_{p}\ensuremath{\ne}{U}_{d}$ falls under Lieb's theorem, provided they are positive definite, so we used DQMC to probe the cases
Up=0,Ud=U and
Up=U,Ud=0. We found that the different environments of
d and
p sites lead to a ferromagnetic insulator when
Ud=0; by contrast,
Up=0 leads to to a metal without any magnetic ordering. In addition, we have also established that at density $\ensuremath{\rho}=1/3$, strong antiferromagnetic correlations set in, caused by the presence of one fermion on each
d site.
We investigate the magnetization of the ground state of the one-dimensional flat-band Hubbard model as a function of the electron filling, using exact diagonalization techniques. Our calculation shows that the systems with odd n holes added to half-filling bands for a sufficiently large U (the on-site Coulomb repulsion energy) have a saturated ferromagnetic ground state, which is nondegenerate except for the trivial spin degeneracy. Dependences of the critical value of U on the size and on λ (a parameter of the system) are also investigated. For all values of λ, it is found that the ground state is a saturated ferromagnetic state if U is sufficiently large. Moreover, we find that the critical U for the saturated ferromagnetic ground state is almost independent on the system size, at least, for the system near quarter-filling. These facts indicate that even if the system size go to infinity, the ferromagnetic ground state can be exist for a finite U .
We consider the standard repulsive Hubbard model with a flat lowest-energy band for two one-dimensional lattices (diamond chain and ladder) as well as for a two-dimensional lattice (bilayer) at half filling of the flat band. The considered models do not fall in the class of Mielke-Tasaki flat-band ferromagnets, since they do not obey the connectivity conditions. However, the ground-state ferromagnetism can emerge, if the flat band becomes dispersive. To study this kinetic-energy-driven ferromagnetism we use perturbation theory and exact diagonalization of finite lattices. We find as a typical scenario that small and moderate dispersion may lead to a ferromagnetic ground state for sufficiently large on-site Hubbard repulsion
U>Uc, where
Uc increases monotonically with the acquired bandwidth. However, we also observe for some specific parameter cases, that (i) ferromagnetism appears at already very small
Uc, (ii) ferromagnetism does not show up at all, (iii) the critical on-site repulsion
Uc is a nonmonotonic function of the bandwidth, or that (iv) a critical bandwidth is needed to open the window for ground-state ferromagnetism.