A study of electron correlations in 2D materials described by the Hubbard model

Niyazi Bulut, Douglas J. Scalapino

Hideki Matsumoto, Ferdinando Mancini

Takashi Yanagisawa

The ground state of the two-dimensional (2D) Hubbard model is investigated by adopting improved wave functions that take into account intersite electron correlation beyond the Gutzwiller ansatz. The ground-state energy is lowered considerably, giving the best estimate of the ground-state energy for the 2D Hubbard model. There is a crossover from weakly to strongly correlated regions as the on-site Coulomb interaction $U$ increases. The antiferromagnetic correlation induced by $U$ is reduced for hole doping when $U$ is large, being greater than the bandwidth, thus increasing the kinetic energy gain. The spin and charge fluctuations are induced in the strongly correlated region. These antiferromagnetic and kinetic charge fluctuations induce electron pairings, which would result in high-temperature superconductivity.

Yoshihiro Asai, Hideki Katagiri

We have studied electron correlations in the doped two-dimensional (2D) Hubbard model by using the coupled-cluster method (CCM) to investigate whether or not the method can be applied to correct the independent particle approximations actually used in ab initio band calculations. The double excitation version of the CCM, implemented using the approximate coupled pair (ACP) method, accounts for most of the correlation energies of the 2D Hubbard model in the weak $(U/t\ensuremath{\simeq}1)$ and the intermediate $U/t$ regions $(U/t\ensuremath{\simeq}4).$ The error in this case is always less than $1%.$ The ACP approximation gets less accurate for large $U/t$ $(U/t\ensuremath{\simeq}8)$ and near half-filling. Further incorporation of electron correlation effects is necessary in this region. The accuracy depends neither on the system size, nor the gap between the lowest unoccupied level and the highest occupied level in the finite size effect. Hence, the CCM may be favorably applied to ab initio band calculations on metals as well as semiconductors and insulators.

A. L. Kuzemskii

Tianyu Zhu, Piotr de Silva, Helen van Aggelen +1 more

Density functional theory (DFT) is the de facto method for the electronic structure of weakly correlated systems. But for strongly correlated materials, common density functional approximations break down. Here, we derive a many-electron expansion (MEE) in DFT that accounts for successive one-, two-, three-, ... particle interactions within the system. To compute the correction terms, the density is first decomposed into a sum of localized, nodeless one-electron densities (${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{i}$). These one-electron densities are used to construct relevant two- (${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{i}+{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{j}$), three- (${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{i}+{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{j}+{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{k}$), ... electron densities. Numerically exact results for these few-particle densities can then be used to correct an approximate density functional via any of several many-body expansions. We show that the resulting hierarchy gives accurate results for several important model systems: the Hubbard and Peierls-Hubbard models in 1D and the pure Hubbard model in 2D. We further show that the method is numerically convergent for strongly correlated systems: applying successively higher order corrections leads to systematic improvement of the results. MEE thus provides a hierarchy of density functional approximations that applies to both weakly and strongly correlated systems.