Do electrons become ferromagnetic just because of their repulsive Coulomb interaction? Our calculations on the three-dimensional electron gas imply that itinerant ferromagnetism of delocalized electrons without lattice and band structure, the most basic model considered by Stoner, is suppressed due to many-body correlations as speculated already by Wigner, and a possible ferromagnetic transition lowering the density is precluded by the formation of the Wigner crystal.
Do electrons become ferromagnetic just because of their repulsive Coulomb interaction? Our calculations on the three-dimensional electron gas imply that itinerant ferromagnetism of delocalized electrons without lattice and band structure, the most basic model considered by Stoner, is suppressed due to many-body correlations as speculated already by Wigner, and a possible ferromagnetic transition lowering the density is precluded by the formation of the Wigner crystal.
Since its introduction in 1963, the Hubbard model has becomes one of the most popular models used in the literature to study cooperative phenomena in narrow-band metals (ferromagnetism, metal-insulator transitions, charge-density waves, high-Tc superconductivity). Amongst all these cooperative phenomena, the problem of itinerant ferromagnetism in the Hubbard model has the longest history. However, in spite of an impressive research activity in the past, the underlying physics (microscopic mechanisms) that leads to the stabilization of itinerant ferromagnetism in Hubbard model (narrow-band metals) is still far from being understood. In this review we present our numerical results concerning this subject, which have been reached by small cluster exact diagonalization, density matrix renormalization group and quantum Monte Carlo calculations within various extensions of the Hubbard model. Particular attention is paid to a description of crucial mechanisms (interactions) that support the stabilization of the ferromagnetic state, and namely: (i) the long-range hopping, (ii) the correlated hopping, (iii) the long-range Coulomb interaction, (iv) the flat bands and (v) the lattice structure. Most of the presented results have been obtained for the one-dimensional case, but the influence of the increasing dimension of the system on the ferromagnetic state is also intensively discussed.
Ferromagnetism is a pure quantum correlation phenomenon, and yet it is responsible for most magnetic phenomena that we encounter in everyday life. Metallic magnets, such as iron and nickel, owe their magnetic behavior to mobile conduction electrons, whose spins can align with one another giving rise to non-zero magnetization. In the 1930s, Edmund C. Stoner first devised a simple and minimal model, where a ferromagnetic instability of the homogeneous Fermi gas is afforded only through short-range repulsive interactions. While his model captures the fundamental physics behind itinerant ferromagnetism, various additional effects in solid materials, such as orbital couplings and peculiar band dispersions, make it difficult to isolate the Stoner mechanism. Here we present our experimental investigation performed on an ultracold Fermi mixture of 6Li atoms where only genuine short-range repulsive interactions are present. Studying the stability of an artificially created ferromagnetic state, we provide a signature of a Stoner-like instability in a metastable system.
In the 1930s, two main paradigms for the theoretical description of ferromagnetism were developed: Heisenberg ferromagnetism of localized fermions (e.g., in a lattice), and Bloch or Stoner ferromagnetism of nonlocalized fermions (i.e., in a gas), also called itinerant ferromagnetism. Despite many theoretical predictions, itinerant ferromagnetism has remained elusive in experiments. This ferromagnetic state is predicted to occur for strong repulsive interactions, corresponding to a regime that is very challenging to describe theoretically because there are multiple competing physical effects, including superfluid pairing. In this paper, we point out that the problem of itinerant ferromagnetism for atomic Fermi gases is different from that of electron gases in metals due to the short-range nature of the interatomic interactions. We also show that the standard saddle point used to describe itinerant ferromagnetism of the electron gas in metals does not apply, because in the short-range limit of this approximation the Pauli exclusion principle is violated. As a remedy, we introduce a modified interaction pseudopotential for ultracold gases which includes both local (Hartree) and nonlocal (Fock) terms while preserving the Pauli exclusion principle in the short-range regime. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of this method to study the existence and stability of itinerant ferromagnetism in ultracold atomic gases. Lastly, we obtain the critical temperature for the ferromagnetic transition as a function of the opposite-spin interaction strength and find a rather good agreement with recent experimental results.
The possibility of crystallization and magnetic ordering in an electron gas is examined in the determinantal approximation, using a variational method. A Mott transition is found at r s similar, equals 10 to a ferromagnetic crystalline state of the Wigner type, while an antiferromagnetic crystalline phase seems to be excluded. A simple way of including correlation effects is proposed, in which a correlation function is introduced into the interaction energy between electrons of antiparallel spin. The possibility then emerges of a crystalline antiferromagnetic phase over the large intermediate density range 10 less, equals r s less, equals 40.
Quantum fluctuations are of central importance in itinerant ferromagnets; when modeled by a homogeneous electron gas with contact interactions, fluctuations deliver a rich phase diagram featuring a first order ferromagnetic transition preempted by a spin spiral and a paired density wave. In this work we develop the formalism to analyze the effects of fluctuations with a realistic screened Coulomb potential. The finite-ranged interaction suppresses the tricritical point temperature of the first order ferromagnetic transition, bringing theory into line with experiment, while retaining the exotic spin spiral and paired density wave. In an ultracold atomic gas a finite-ranged interaction damps the competing molecular instability, permitting the observation of ferromagnetic correlations.
Whether spin-independent Coulomb interaction can be the origin of a realistic ferromagnetism in an itinerant electron system has been an open problem for a long time. Here we study a class of Hubbard models on decorated lattices, which have a special property that the corresponding single-electron Schrödinger equation has Nd-fold degenerate ground states. The degeneracy Nd is proportional to the total number of sites $\absΛ$. We prove that the ground states of the models exhibit ferromagnetism when the electron filling factor is not more than and sufficiently close to $ρ_0=N_{\rm d}/(2\absΛ)$, and paramagnetism when the filling factor is sufficiently small. An important feature of the present work is that it provides examples of three dimensional itinerant electron systems which are proved to exhibit ferromagnetism in a finite range of the electron filling factor.