We calculate zero-temperature correlation functions for a model of two-dimensional interacting electrons with short-range interactions and a square Fermi surface. The model was arrived at by mapping electronic states near a square Fermi surface with Hubbard-like interactions onto one-dimensional quantum chains, retaining terms that can be written in terms of bosonic density operators. Interactions between orthogonal chains, corresponding to orthogonal faces of the square Fermi surface, are neglected. The correlation functions become sums of Luttinger-type correlation functions due to the bosonic model. However, the correlation function exponents differ in form from those of the Luttinger model. As a consequence, the simple scaling relations found to exist between the Luttinger model exponents, do not carry over to the leading exponents of our model. We find that for repulsive effective interactions, charge-density wave/spin-density wave instabilities are dominant. We do not consider d-wave instabilities here.
We consider serious conceptual problems with the application of standard perturbation theory, in its zero-temperature version, to the computation of the dressed Fermi surface for an interacting electronic system. In order to overcome these difficulties, we set up a variational approach which is shown to be equivalent to the renormalized perturbation theory where the dressed Fermi surface is fixed by recursively computed counterterms. The physical picture that emerges is that couplings that are irrelevant tend to deform the Fermi surface in order to become more relevant (irrelevant couplings being those that do not exist at vanishing excitation energy because of kinematical constraints attached to the Fermi surface). These insights are incorporated in a renormalization group approach, which allows for a simple approximate computation of Fermi surface deformation in quasi-one-dimensional electronic conductors. We also analyze flow equations for the effective couplings and quasiparticle weights. For systems away from half-filling, the flows show three regimes corresponding to a Luttinger liquid at high energies, a Fermi liquid, and a low-energy incommensurate spin-density wave. At half-filling Umklapp processes allow for a Mott insulator regime where the dressed Fermi surface is flat, implying a confined phase with vanishing effective transverse single-particle coherence. The boundary between the confined and Fermi liquid phases is found to occur for a bare transverse hopping amplitude of the order of the Mott charge gap of a single chain.
We study the effect of doping away from half-filling in weakly (but finitely) interacting N-leg Hubbard ladders using renormalization-group and bosonization techniques. For a small on-site repulsion U, the N-leg Hubbard ladders are equivalent to an N-band model, where at half-filling the Fermi velocities are ${v}_{1}{=v}_{N}<{v}_{2}{=v}_{N\ensuremath{-}1}<\ensuremath{\cdot}\ensuremath{\cdot}\ensuremath{\cdot}.$ We then obtain a hierarchy of energy scales, where the band pairs $(j,N+1\ensuremath{-}j)$ are successively frozen out. The low-energy Hamiltonian is then the sum of
N/2 [or $(N\ensuremath{-}1)/2$ for N odd] two-leg ladder Hamiltonians without gapless excitations (plus a single chain for N odd with one gapless spin mode)---similar to the N-leg Heisenberg spin ladders. The energy scales lead to a hierarchy of gaps. Upon doping away from half-filling, the holes first enter the band(s) with the smallest gap: For odd N, the holes enter first the nonbonding band
(N+1)/2 and the phase is a Luttinger liquid, while for even N, the holes enter first the band pair
(N/2,N/2+1) and the phase is a Luther-Emery liquid, similar to numerical treatments of the $t\ensuremath{-}J$ model, i.e., at and close to half-filling, the phases of the Hubbard ladders for small and large U are the same. For increasing doping, hole pairs subsequently enter at critical dopings the other band pairs $(j,N+1\ensuremath{-}j)$ (accompanied by a diverging compressibility): The Fermi surface is successively opened by doping, starting near the wave vector $(\ensuremath{\pi}/2,\ensuremath{\pi}/2).$ Explicit calculations are given for the cases
N=3 and 4.
An exact-diagonalization technique on small clusters is used to study the ground states and single-particle excitations of the Hubbard model with on-site (U) and nearest-neighbor (V) Coulombic repulsive interactions. It is shown that the long-range charge-density-wave state realized in a half-filled two-dimensional square lattice for 4V\ensuremath{\gtrsim}U persists up to quarter filling, and that the doped carriers form a small Fermi surface that encloses an area corresponding to the number of doped carriers rather than the total number of electrons involved in the system. The present result offers a well-defined counterexample in the discussion of the Fermi-surface dimensions of strongly correlated electron systems, and may provide a complementary understanding of the large Fermi surface believed to exist in the ordinary Hubbard model.