Coexisting Ground State of Ferromagnetic and Charge Orderings in the Doped Extended Hubbard Ladder with Intersite Repulsions

Abstract

The origin of metallic ferromagnetism is a long-standing problem in condensed matter physics, because it is a strong coupling phenomenon essentially. It was also known that one dimensional systems have a lesser chance of showing ferromagnetism in the ground states. In fact, for a class of one-dimensional correlated electron systems including the simple Hubbard chain, the ground state was proved to be nonmagnetic. Several authors have been studied whether ferromagnetism is stabilized or not by taking neglected terms in the simple Hubbard chain into account. It was shown that a positive next-nearest neighbor hopping leads to ferromagnetism for less-than-half filled systems in strong correlation regime on the basis of DMRG calculations. We call this model the railroad–trestle-lattice Hubbard model below. The railroad–trestle lattice is graphically shown in Fig. 1. In this article, we treat the problem of ferromagnetism of the nearly half-filled extended Hubbard ladder with an additional intersite repulsion V . The Hamiltonian is H 1⁄4 t P hi; ji; ðc y i cj þ c y j ci Þ þU P i nini# þV P hi; ji ninj, where ci represent electron creation operators, ni 1⁄4 P c y i ci , and hi; ji denotes nearest-neighbor pairs of the sites on the two-leg ladder. Vojta et al. made a DMRG study of this model in strong coupling region. Tsuchiizu and Suzumura recently studied this model by using the weakcoupling bosonization method, motivated by the experimental observation of a charge-density-wave in the selfdoped ladder compound Sr14 xCaxCu24O41. 7,8) We first mention the half-filled case, i.e., electron density n 1⁄4 1. When U < 3V , the ground state has the checkerboard-type charge-ordering shown in Fig. 2 due to the intersite repulsion. (The sublattice consisting of doubly occupied sites is defined as A-sublattice.) Our main concern is what happens when holes are doped into this chargeordered insulating state. By using the DMRG method, Vojta et al. calculated the checkerboard-type charge-ordering correlation function from quarter-filling to half-filling, 1=2 n 1, where U 1⁄4 8t was chosen. They confirmed that the long-range charge-order correlation is obtained for V VcðnÞ ’ U=3. They also found that the total spin of the doped charge-ordering state is not zero, i.e., the charge ordering coexists with ferromagnetism. However, the origin of this ferromagnetism was not clarified. The main purpose of this paper is to get intuitive understanding of the ferromagnetism in the doped charge-ordered state. In order to attack this issue, we assume t U, V and use strong coupling expansion. Then, we calculate the effective Hamiltonian for holes doped into the charge-ordered state at half-filling. When holes are introduced, they enter the A-sublattice sites [see Fig. 3(a)]. If we totally neglect the bare hopping term in H, then we have the ground state degeneracy concerned with the way of arrangement of doped holes. The introduction of the bare hopping term resolves this degeneracy and is expected to induce an ordering of the doped holes. In order to write down the second-order effective Hamiltonian with respect to t, it is convenient to carry out the particle–hole transformation for the A-sublattice according to c‘ 1⁄4 a‘ , where a y ‘ are the creation operators of the A-sublattice holes. Within the two-hole approximation, we obtain the following effective Hamiltonian: