We reconsider the strong-coupling expansion for the Hubbard model recently introduced by Sarker and Pairault et al. By introducing slave particles that act as projection operators onto the empty, singly occupied and doubly occupied atomic states, the perturbation theory around the atomic limit distinguishes between processes that do conserve or do not conserve the total number of doubly occupied sites. This allows for a systematic t/U expansion that does not break down at low temperature (t being the intersite hopping amplitude and U the local Coulomb repulsion). The fermionic field becomes a two-component field, which reflects the presence of the two Hubbard bands. The single-particle propagator is naturally expressed as a function of a 2×2 matrix self-energy. Furthermore, by introducing a time- and space-fluctuating spin-quantization axis in the functional integral, we can expand around a "non-degenerate" ground-state where each singly occupied site has a well defined spin direction (which may fluctuate in time). This formalism is used to derive the effective action of charge carriers in the lower Hubbard band to first order in t/U. We recover the action of the t–J model in the spin-hole coherent-state path integral. We also compare our results with those previously obtained by studying fluctuations around the large-U Hartree–Fock saddle point.
The Hubbard I decoupling approximation [J. Hubbard, Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 276, 238 (1963)] is extended by introducing a k-dependent self-energy which describes a mobile correlation hole of opposite spin propagating along with the electron in its way around the lattice. The theory, despite its simplicity, (1) becomes exact in the strong-coupling limit; and (2) reproduces with great accuracy the ground-state energy, the double occupancy, the on-site correlation functions, and the effective hopping for all the values of the Hubbard Coulomb repulsion U. It also gives reasonable spectral functions leading to (3) a single-particle Green function showing the well-known spectral-weight transfer between the Hubbard bands as soon as the electron density deviates from half-filling, and (4) a momentum distribution as well as magnetic and charge structure factors in qualitative agreement with quantum Monte Carlo simulations, slave-boson calculations, and conserving approximations like fluctuation exchange and parquet. On the other hand, as in most decoupling schemes, liftime effects and the near-Fermi-level additional structure characteristic of strongly correlated electron systems are missing.
We describe a unitary transformation which eliminates terms coupling states with differing numbers of doubly occupied sites from the Hamiltonian of the Hubbard model. The
S matrix for the transformation, and the transformed Hamiltonian, ${H}^{\ensuremath{'}}$, are generated by an iterative procedure which results in an expansion in powers of the hopping integral
t divided by the on-site energy
U. For a half-filled band and in the space with no doubly occupied sites, ${H}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ is equivalent to a spin Hamiltonian. We discuss the implications of our results for ${H}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ on theories of high-temperature superconductivity.
The two-dimensional (2D) Hubbard model is solved in a new way. The zero-frequency components of the Hubbard interaction are separated out and solved to infinite order to avoid the traditional difficulties associated with perturbation theory in the strong-coupling limit. Specifically the zero-frequency spin interaction is decoupled by the introduction of Stratonovich-Hubbard fields, while the zero-frequency charge interaction is treated by "slave" Hartree-Fock. This approach leads to the formation of large fluctuating spin moments, and as a consequence the one-electron spectral density exhibits a pseudogap. A Metropolis Monte Carlo method is used to perform the configuration averaging over Stratonovich-Hubbard fields. Within single Monte Carlo configurations the non-zero frequency components of the Hubbard interaction are treated by a high-order perturbation method, which incorporates the exchange of dynamical particle-hole fluctuations. Since a single configuration has neither translational symmetry nor spin rotational symmetry, these fluctuations do not have a well-defined crystal momentum or total spin. When the dynamical particle-hole fluctuations are included in the calculation, localized electron pairing results at elevated temperatures. Superconductivity presumably onsets when these localized pairs develop coherence, but this is not studied in the present work. The nature of the pairing interaction and the resulting pair eigenfunctions is studied.
The novel slave-free (i.e. without slave bosons and fermions) approach to the problem of strong correlations is used in studying the Hubbard (t-J) model, where the self-energy is expressed in terms of charge and spin vertex functions of Hubbard operators. A systematic 1/N expansion (N is the number of spin components) of the self-energy is carried out. In O(1) it gives the same quasiparticle spectrum as the slave boson theory. The next order O(1/N) of the self-energy Σ(k, ω) is calculated exactly by solving analytically the integral equations for the charge and spin vertices. As an example for the feasibility of the proposed method explicit results for Σ(k, ω) are given in the case J=0. Dealing only with observable quantities our method is transparent and easily applicable to models which exclude double occupancy on lattice sites, such as the Anderson model and the Emery model for high temperature superconductors.
The cluster slave-spin method is introduced to systematically investigate the solutions of the Hubbard model including the symmetry-broken phases. In this method, the electron operator is factorized into a fermionic spinon describing the physical spin and a slave-spin describing the charge fluctuations. Following the
U(1) formalism derived by Yu and Si [Phys. Rev. B 86, 085104 (2012)], it is shown that the self-consistent equations to explore various symmetry-broken density wave states can be constructed in general with a cluster of multiple slave-spin sites. We employ this method to study the antiferromagnetic (AFM) state in the single band Hubbard model with the two- and four-site clusters of slave spins. While the Hubbard gap, the charge gap due to the doubly occupied states, scales with the Hubbard interaction
U as expected, the AFM gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$, the gap in the spinon dispersion in the AFM state, exhibits a crossover from the weak- to strong-coupling behaviors as
U increases. Our cluster slave-spin method reproduces not only the traditional mean-field behavior of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\sim}U$ in the weak-coupling limit, but also the behavior of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{2}/U$ predicted by the superexchange mechanism in the strong-coupling limit. In addition, the holon-doublon correlator as functions of
U and doping
x is also computed, which exhibits a strong tendency toward the holon-doublon binding in the strong coupling regime. We further show that the quasiparticle weight obtained by the cluster slave-spin method is in a good agreement with the generalized Gutzwiller approximation in both AFM and paramagnetic states, and the results can be improved beyond the generalized Gutzwiller approximation as the cluster is enlarged from a single site to four sites. Our results demonstrate that the cluster slave-spin method can be a powerful tool to systematically investigate the strongly correlated system.
The Hubbard model is investigated using functional integrals and a Hubbard-Stratonovich decomposition of the interaction term. Using a spin-space reference frame that fluctuates in time and space, the effective action both is spin-rotation invariant and exhibits the correct Hartree-Fock saddle point. For strong correlation the effective action for free carriers and spins coupled via a gauge field is obtained as a systematic expansion in t/U. The spiral state existing for small doping is discussed. The formalism allows straightforward generalization to intermediate and weak coupling.