We describe a theoretical approach for finding spontaneously symmetry-broken electronic phases due to strong electronic interactions when using recently developed slave-particle (slave-boson) approaches based on occupation numbers. We describe why, to date, spontaneous symmetry breaking has proven difficult to achieve in such approaches. We then provide a total-energy based approach for introducing auxiliary symmetry breaking fields into the solution of the slave-particle problem that leads to lowered total energies for symmetry broken phases. We point out that not all slave-particle approaches yield to energy lowering: the slave-particle model being used must explicitly describe the degrees of freedom that break symmetry. Finally, our total energy approach permits us to greatly simplify the formalism used to achieve a self-consistent solution between spinon and slave modes while increasing numerical stability and greatly speeding up the calculations.
We introduce the generalization of the slave-spin mean-field method to broken-symmetry phases. Through a variational approach we derive the single-particle energy shift in the mean-field equations which generates the appropriate self-consistent field responsible for the stabilization of the broken symmetry. With this correction the different flavors of the slave-spin mean field are actually the same method and they give identical results to Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave bosons and to the Gutzwiller approximation. We apply our formalism to the N\'eel antiferromagnetic state and study it in multiorbital models as a function of the number of orbitals and Hund's coupling strength, providing phase diagrams in the interaction-doping plane. We show that the doped antiferromagnet in proximity of half filling is typically unstable toward insulator-metal and magnetic-nonmagnetic phase separation. Hund's coupling extends the range of this antiferromagnet, and favors its phase separation.
We introduce a set of generalized slave-particle models for extended Hubbard models that treat localized electronic correlations using slave-boson decompositions. Our models automatically include two slave-particle methods of recent interest, the slave-rotor and slave-spin methods, as well as a ladder of new intermediate models where one can choose which of the electronic degrees of freedom (e.g., spin or orbital labels) are treated as correlated degrees of freedom by the slave bosons. In addition, our method removes the aberrant behavior of the slave-rotor model, where it systematically overestimates the importance of electronic correlation effects for weak interaction strength, by removing the contribution of unphysical states from the bosonic Hilbert space. The flexibility of our formalism permits one to separate and isolate the effect of correlations on the key degrees of freedom.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking of interacting fermion systems constitutes a major challenge for many-body theory due to the proliferation of new independent scattering channels once absent or degenerate in the symmetric phase. One example is given by the ferro/antiferromagnetic broken symmetry phase (BSP) of the Hubbard model, where vertices in the spin-transverse and spin-longitudinal channels become independent with a consequent increase in the computational power for their calculation. We generalise the non-perturbative Two-Particle-Self-Consistent method (TPSC) to address broken SU(2) magnetic phases in the Hubbard model, offering an efficient approach that incorporates strong correlations. We show that in the BSP, the sum-rule enforcement of susceptibilities must be accompanied by a modified gap equation resulting in a renormalisation of the order parameter, vertex corrections and the preservation of the gap-less feature of the Goldstone modes. We then apply the theory to the antiferromagnetic phase of the Hubbard model in the cubic lattice at half-filling. We compare our results of double occupancies and staggered magnetisation to the ones obtained using Diagrammatic Monte Carlo showing excellent quantitative agreement. We demonstrate how vertex corrections play a central role in lowering the Higgs resonance with respect to the quasi-particle excitation gap in the spin-longitudinal susceptibility, yielding a well visible Higgs-mode.
The cluster slave-spin method is introduced to systematically investigate the solutions of the Hubbard model including the symmetry-broken phases. In this method, the electron operator is factorized into a fermionic spinon describing the physical spin and a slave-spin describing the charge fluctuations. Following the
U(1) formalism derived by Yu and Si [Phys. Rev. B 86, 085104 (2012)], it is shown that the self-consistent equations to explore various symmetry-broken density wave states can be constructed in general with a cluster of multiple slave-spin sites. We employ this method to study the antiferromagnetic (AFM) state in the single band Hubbard model with the two- and four-site clusters of slave spins. While the Hubbard gap, the charge gap due to the doubly occupied states, scales with the Hubbard interaction
U as expected, the AFM gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$, the gap in the spinon dispersion in the AFM state, exhibits a crossover from the weak- to strong-coupling behaviors as
U increases. Our cluster slave-spin method reproduces not only the traditional mean-field behavior of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\sim}U$ in the weak-coupling limit, but also the behavior of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{2}/U$ predicted by the superexchange mechanism in the strong-coupling limit. In addition, the holon-doublon correlator as functions of
U and doping
x is also computed, which exhibits a strong tendency toward the holon-doublon binding in the strong coupling regime. We further show that the quasiparticle weight obtained by the cluster slave-spin method is in a good agreement with the generalized Gutzwiller approximation in both AFM and paramagnetic states, and the results can be improved beyond the generalized Gutzwiller approximation as the cluster is enlarged from a single site to four sites. Our results demonstrate that the cluster slave-spin method can be a powerful tool to systematically investigate the strongly correlated system.
Strongly-correlated fermion systems on a lattice have been a subject of intense focus in the field of condensed-matter physics. These systems are notoriously difficult to solve, even with state-of-the-art numerical methods, especially in regimes of parameters where degrees of freedom compete or cooperate at similar energy and length scales. Here, we introduce a spin-1 slave-particle technique to approximately treat the t-U-V-J fermionic model at arbitrary electron dopings in an economical manner. This formalism respectively maps the original charge and spin degrees of freedom into effective pseudo-spin and pseudo-fermion sectors, which are treated using a self-consistent cluster mean-field method. We study the phase diagram of the model under various conditions and report the appearance of charge and spin stripes within this formalism. These stripes are a consequence of the cluster mean-field treatment of the pseudo-particle sectors and have not been detected in previous slave-particle studies. The results obtained agree qualitatively well with what more reliable numerical methods capture.