Slave bosons are commonly introduced in order to implement an infinite Hubbard U by means of a local constraint. The usual starting point for investigations within this scheme is a mean-field theory in which the constraint is taken to be global. This approximate treatment of the constraint is studied in the context of a two-band Hubbard model, and it is shown that (i) the ground state has a significant number of doubly occupied sites, despite the infinite on-site repulsion in the original model, and (ii) there is an unphysical tendency for pairing. However, it is found that if the local constraint is retained for the insulator at half filling, then mean-field theory gives the correct result that the double occupancy is zero.
Slave bosons are commonly introduced in order to implement an infinite Hubbard U by means of a local constraint. The usual starting point for investigations within this scheme is a mean-field theory in which the constraint is taken to be global. This approximate treatment of the constraint is studied in the context of a two-band Hubbard model, and it is shown that (i) the ground state has a significant number of doubly occupied sites, despite the infinite on-site repulsion in the original model, and (ii) there is an unphysical tendency for pairing. However, it is found that if the local constraint is retained for the insulator at half filling, then mean-field theory gives the correct result that the double occupancy is zero.
We investigate the possibility of superconductivity in the large-U limit of the Hubbard model near half filling, using a slave-boson representation. The local constraint is treated in a novel way, incorporating short-range fluctuations in addition to the global constraint. We find slave-boson pairing and a superconducting extended s-wave phase at hole concentrations $\ensuremath{\delta}$-above 4% and below 32%.
Slave boson mean-field studies of the ground state of the Hubbard model with correlated hopping were performed. The approach qualitatively recovers the exact results for the case when the hopping integral t equals the correlated hopping integral X. The phase diagram for the strongly correlated state with only singly occupied sites, the weakly correlated state, where single and double occupation is allowed, and for the superconducting state, was determined for any value of X and any electron concentration n. At the half-filled band (n=1) a direct transition from the superconductor to the Mott insulator was found. In the region of strong correlations the superconducting solution is stable for n close to 1, in contrast to the case of weak correlations, in which superconductivity occurs at $n\ensuremath{\approx}0$ and $n\ensuremath{\approx}2.$ We have also found that strong correlations change the characteristics of the superconducting phase, e.g., the gap in the excitation spectrum exhibits a nonexponential dependence on the on-site Coulomb integral U close to the phase-transition point.
The Anderson impurity model for finite values of the Coulomb repulsion U is studied using a slave-boson representation for the empty and doubly occupied f level. In order to avoid well-known problems with a naive mean-field theory for the boson fields, we use the coherent-state-path integral representation to first integrate out the double-occupancy slave bosons. The resulting effective action is linearized using two-time auxiliary fields. After integration over the fermionic degrees of freedom, one obtains an effective action suitable for a 1/Nf expansion. The same problem remains concerning the constraint as in the infinite U case. For T\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0 and Nf\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}, exact results for the ground-state properties are recovered in the saddle-point approximation. Numerical solutions of the saddle-point equations show that even in the spin-degenerate case Nf=2 the results are quite good.
The Mott metal-insulator transition in the Hubbard model is studied by constructing a dynamical slave-boson mean-field theory in the limit of large lattice coordination number z that incorporates the binding between doubly occupied (doublon) and empty (holon) sites. On the Mott insulating side where all doublons and holons bond in real space into excitonic pairs leading to the charge gap, the theory simplifies considerably to leading order in 1/z and becomes exact on the infinite-z Bethe lattice. An asymptotic solution is obtained for a continuous Mott transition associated with the closing of the charge gap at a critical value of the Hubbard Uc and the corresponding doublon density ndc, hopping ${\ensuremath{\chi}}_{d}^{c}$ and doublon-holon pairing ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{d}^{c}$ amplitudes. We find ${U}_{c}={U}_{\mathrm{BR}}[1\ensuremath{-}2{n}_{d}^{c}\ensuremath{-}\sqrt{z}({\ensuremath{\chi}}_{d}^{c}+{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}}_{d}^{c})]\ensuremath{\simeq}0.8{U}_{\mathrm{BR}}$, where UBR is the critical value for the Brinkman-Rice transition in the Gutzwiller approximation captured in the static mean-field solution of the slave-boson formulation of Kotliar and Ruckenstein. Thus, the Mott transition can be viewed as the quantum correction to the Brinkman-Rice transition due to doublon-holon binding. Quantitative comparisons are made to the results of the dynamical mean-field theory, showing good agreement. In the absence of magnetic order, the Mott insulator is a U(1) quantum spin liquid with nonzero intersite spinon hopping that survives the large-z limit and lifts the 2N-fold degeneracy of the local moments. We show that the spinons are coupled to the doublons/holons by a dissipative compact U(1) gauge field in the deconfined phase, realizing the spin-charge separated gapless spin liquid Mott insulator.
We discuss the relevance of the improved mean-field slave-fermion theory to describe the Nagaoka $(U=\ensuremath{\infty})$ limit of the Hubbard model. In this theory the crucial on-site constraint of no double electron occupancy is taken into account rigorously prior to the mean-field approximation. At one-loop approximation the effective mean-field action shows a long-range ferromagnetic order over the whole doping range. This indicates that the slave-fermion mean-field theory does not constitute an appropriate framework to describe the physics of the Nagaoka phase. We discuss the drawbacks of this mean-field theory and present some results on the derivation of a low-energy effective spin action to describe the Nagaoka phase beyond the mean-field approximation.
We examine the two existing slave-boson methods for the finite-U Hubbard model by Kotliar and Ruckenstein (KR) and by Newns et al. and Zou and Anderson (NZA) in the light of the Fermi-liquid quasiparticle picture. It is shown that to treat doubly occupied states the KR slave-boson scheme is more consistent with this picture and that the well-known erroneous gauge-symmetry breaking encountered in the mean-field treatment of the NZA double-occupancy boson is due to the presence of the hidden double-fermion operators. Then, the effective intersite antiferromagnetic interaction between quasiparticles is derived in the KR slave-boson approach by taking into account empty and double-occupancy slave-boson fluctuations to O(1/N2) in the 1/N expansion of the functional-integral formalism. The obtained effective exchange coupling constant Jeff(\ensuremath{\delta})=J(2p02-\ensuremath{\delta}/2) with J\ensuremath{\equiv}tij2/U is strongly dependent upon doping \ensuremath{\delta} and is scaled with the reduced Coulomb repulsion u\ensuremath{\equiv}U/Uc in the two-dimensional (2D) and 3D Hubbard models, where Uc is the critical value for the metal-to-insulator transition. The roles of this intersite correlation and the spin-dependent band-renormalization correlation included in the mean-field theory for the paramagnetic-to-antiferromagnetic instability are compared in the two Hubbard models. The intersite contribution is more significant in the 2D case than in the 3D case, but is generally small compared with the band effect except for small dopings \ensuremath{\delta} and smaller U values. The maximum doping ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\delta}}}_{\mathrm{cr}}$ for the paramagnetic-to-ferromagnetic instability in the strong-coupling limit (U\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}) of the 2D and 3D Hubbard models is found to be ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\delta}}}_{\mathrm{cr}}$\ensuremath{\sim}0.28 and ${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\delta}}}_{\mathrm{cr}}$\ensuremath{\sim}0.38, respectively.