The purpose of this opening chapter is threefold: to introduce the Hubbard model, to discuss its origin and significance and to give a brief summary of its history. Rather than beginning with more general and historical considerations we will start with a concrete albeit somewhat technical discussion of how the Hubbard model arises as an effective description of electronic degrees of freedom in solids. On the origin of the Hubbard model The Hubbard model is named after John Hubbard, who in a series of influential articles [201–206] introduced the Hamiltonian in order to model electronic correlations in narrow energy bands and proposed a number of approximate treatments of the associated many-body problem. Our following discussion of how the Hubbard Hamiltonian arises in an approximate description of interacting electrons in a solid loosely parallels Hubbard's original work. We will assume that the reader is familiar with the basic concepts of solid state theory (see e.g. [25, 509]) and with the formalism of second quantization (e.g. [283]). For further reading we refer to the original literature [188, 201, 233] and to the monographs [27, 158, 498]. A solid consists of ions and electrons condensed in a three-dimensional crystalline structure. Since the ions are much heavier than the electrons, it is often a good phenomenological starting point for the exploration of the electronic properties of solids to think of the ions as forming a static lattice.
The purpose of this opening chapter is threefold: to introduce the Hubbard model, to discuss its origin and significance and to give a brief summary of its history. Rather than beginning with more general and historical considerations we will start with a concrete albeit somewhat technical discussion of how the Hubbard model arises as an effective description of electronic degrees of freedom in solids. On the origin of the Hubbard model The Hubbard model is named after John Hubbard, who in a series of influential articles [201–206] introduced the Hamiltonian in order to model electronic correlations in narrow energy bands and proposed a number of approximate treatments of the associated many-body problem. Our following discussion of how the Hubbard Hamiltonian arises in an approximate description of interacting electrons in a solid loosely parallels Hubbard's original work. We will assume that the reader is familiar with the basic concepts of solid state theory (see e.g. [25, 509]) and with the formalism of second quantization (e.g. [283]). For further reading we refer to the original literature [188, 201, 233] and to the monographs [27, 158, 498]. A solid consists of ions and electrons condensed in a three-dimensional crystalline structure. Since the ions are much heavier than the electrons, it is often a good phenomenological starting point for the exploration of the electronic properties of solids to think of the ions as forming a static lattice.
The description of solids at a microscopic level is complex, involving the interaction of a huge number of its constituents, such as ions or electrons. It is impossible to solve the corresponding many-body problems analytically or numerically, although much insight can be gained from the analysis of simplified models. An important example is the Hubbard model, which describes interacting electrons in narrow energy bands, and which has been applied to problems as diverse as high-Tc superconductivity, band magnetism, and the metal-insulator transition. This 2005 book presents a coherent, self-contained account of the exact solution of the Hubbard model in one dimension. The early chapters will be accessible to beginning graduate students with a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. The later chapters address more advanced topics, and are intended as a guide for researchers to some of the more topical results in the field of integrable models.
I briefly overview the original formulation of the t-J model starting from Hubbard model, as well as stress its unique features, i.e., advantages and shortcomings when discussing its physical properties. Particular emphasis is put on a brief characterization of connection between magnetism, unconventional superconductivity, and the Mott-Hubbard localization of the correlated carriers in a narrow band. In the second part I summarize the model generalization to the three--orbital situation. The main purpose is to list some basic features of the physics associated with t--J model.
The first objective of this chapter is to briefly review some of the basic ideas about the structure of matter, in particular the concepts of microscopic physics, in order to recall the knowledge gained in previous physics (and chemistry) courses and make it more precise. Our review will be very concise, and most statements will be made without any proof or detailed discussion. A second objective is to give a brief description of some of the crucial stages in the early development of quantum physics. We shall not follow the strict historical order of this development or present the arguments used at the beginning of the last century by the founding fathers of quantum mechanics; rather, we shall stress the concepts which we shall find useful later on. Our last objective is to give an elementary introduction to some of the basic ideas, like those of a quantum particle or energy level, that will reappear throughout this text. We shall base our review on the Bohr theory, which provides a simple, though far from convincing, explanation of how energy levels are quantized and how the spectrum of the hydrogen atom arises. This chapter should be reread later on, once the basic ideas of quantum mechanics have been made explicit and illustrated by examples. From the practical point of view, it is possible to skip the general considerations of Sections 1.1 and 1.2 at the first reading and begin with Section 1.3, returning to those two sections later on as needed.
This chapter provides an introduction to the theory of strongly correlated electrons and discusses some of the ideas that presently are being pursued to try to resolve this dilemma. The Hubbard Model is by now surely the most infamous or notorious model problem in solid state physics because the ratio of number of papers to understanding of this model must be an all time record. Yet it is a model which describes the competition between the kinetic energy and the Coulomb interaction in the simplest way. Its origin lies in work of Van Vleck. One tried and true method when have to deal with strong interactions is to look for the right mean-field or Hartree-Fock method. This method has of course been widely applied to the Hubbard Model. The one-dimesional Hubbard model with t not equal to zero for nearest neighbours was solved by Lieb and Wu using Bethe-Ansatz methods.
The calculation of a wavefunction took about two afternoons, and five wavefunctions were calculated in the whole …. Wigner and Seitz, 1933 Summary In order to explain many important properties of materials and phenomena, it is necessary to go beyond independent-particle approximations and directly account for many-body effects that result from electronic interaction. The many-body problem is a major scientific challenge, but there has been great progress resulting from theoretical developments and advances in computation. This chapter is a short introduction to the interacting-electron problem, with some of the history that has led up to the concepts and methods described in this book. The many-body interacting-electron problem ranks among the most fascinating and fruitful areas of research in physics and chemistry. It has a rich history, starting from the early days of quantum mechanics and continuing with new intellectual challenges and opportunities. The vitality of electronic structure theory arises in large part from the close connection with experiment and applications. It is spurred on by new discoveries and advances in techniques that probe the behavior of electrons in depth. In turn, theoretical concepts and calculations can now make predictions that suggest new experiments, as well as provide quantitative information that is difficult or not yet possible to measure experimentally. This book is concerned with the effects of interactions between electrons beyond independent-particle approximations. Some phenomena cannot be explained by any independent-electron method, such as broadening and lifetime of excited states and two-particle bound states (excitons) that are crucial for optical properties of materials. There are many other examples, such as the van derWaals interaction between neutral molecules that arises from the dipole–induced dipole interaction. This force, which is entirely due to correlation between electrons, is an essential mechanism determining the functions of biological systems. Other properties, such as thermodynamically stable magnetic phases, would not exist if there were no interactions between electrons; even though mean-field approximations can describe average effects, they do not account for fluctuations around the average. Ground-state properties, such as the equilibrium structures of molecules and solids, can be described by density functional theory (DFT) and the Kohn–Sham independent-particle equations. However, present approximations are often not sufficient, and for many properties the equations, when used in a straightforward way, do not give a proper description, even in principle.
The Hubbard model was originally introduced as a description of the motion of electrons in transition metals, with the motivation of understanding their magnetic properties. This original model remains a very active subject of research today, and important progress has been made in recent years by examining its properties in the limit of large spatial dimensionality. In this chapter, we shall only examine the much simpler “boson Hubbard model,” following the analysis in an important paper by Fisher, Weichman, Grinstein, and Fisher. As the name implies, the elementary degrees of freedom in this model are spinless bosons, which take the place of the spin-½ fermionic electrons in the original model. These bosons could represent Cooper pairs of electrons undergoing Josephson tunneling between super conducting islands or helium atoms moving on a substrate. Processes in which the Cooper pair boson decays into a pair of electrons are neglected in this simple model, and this caveat must be kept in mind while discussing experimental applications. Many of the results discussed in this chapter were also obtained in early literature on quantum transitions in anisotropic magnets in the presence of an applied magnetic field. These are reviewed by Kaganov and Chubukov, who also gave an extensive discussion of experimental applications. We will, however, not use their formulation here. Apart from its direct physical applications, the importance of the boson Hubbard model lies in providing one of the simplest realizations of a quantum phase transition that does not map onto a previously studied classical phase transition in one higher dimension.