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arXiv:cond-mat/9909067 · Physical Review Letters

Suppression of Ground-State Magnetization in Finite-Size Systems due to Off-Diagonal Interaction Fluctuations

Philippe Jacquod, A. Douglas Stone

Published Apr 24, 2000• 54 citations
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Abstract

We study a generic model of interacting fermions in a finite-size disordered system. We show that the off-diagonal interaction matrix elements induce density of state fluctuations which generically favor a minimum spin ground state at large interaction amplitude, U. This effect competes with the exchange effect which favors large magnetization at large U, and it suppresses this exchange magnetization in a large parameter range. When off-diagonal fluctuations dominate, the model predicts a spin gap which is larger for odd-spin ground states as for even spin, suggesting a simple experimental signature of this off-diagonal effect in Coulomb blockade transport measurements.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.84.3938

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We study a generic model of interacting fermions in a finite-size disordered system. We show that the off-diagonal interaction matrix elements induce density of state fluctuations which generically favor a minimum spin ground state at large interaction amplitude, U. This effect competes with the exchange effect which favors large magnetization at large U, and it suppresses this exchange magnetization in a large parameter range. When off-diagonal fluctuations dominate, the model predicts a spin gap which is larger for odd-spin ground states as for even spin, suggesting a simple experimental signature of this off-diagonal effect in Coulomb blockade transport measurements.
We study a model of n interacting fermions in a disordered potential, which is assumed to generate uniformly fluctuating interaction matrix elements. We show that the ground-state magnetization is systematically decreased by off-diagonal fluctuations of the interaction matrix elements. This effect is neglected in the Stoner picture of itinerant ferromagnetism in which the ground-state magnetization is simply determined by the balance between ferromagnetic exchange and kinetic energy, and increasing the interaction strength always favors ferromagnetism. The physical origin of the demagnetizing effect of interaction fluctuations is the larger number K of final states available for interaction-induced scattering in the lower-spin sectors of the Hilbert space. We analyze the energetic role played by these fluctuations in the limits of small and large interactions U. In the small-UUU limit we use second-order perturbation theory and identify explicitly transitions which are allowed for minimal spin and forbidden for higher spin. These transitions then on average lower the energy of the minimal spin ground state with respect to higher spin; we analytically evaluate the size of this reduction and find it to give a contribution ${\ensuremath{\Delta}}^{s}\ensuremath{\propto}{\mathrm{nU}}^{2}/\ensuremath{\Delta}$ to the spin gap between the two lowest-spin ground states. In terms of an average effective Hamiltonian, these contributions induce a ${\mathrm{nU}}^{2}{S}^{2}/\ensuremath{\Delta}$ term which decreases the strength of the ferromagnetic exchange, thereby delaying the onset of Stoner ferromagnetism, and generate a second, larger S term $\ensuremath{\propto}{S}^{3},$ which results in a saturation of the ground-state spin before full polarization is achieved, in contrast to the Stoner scenario. For large interactions U we amplify on our earlier work [Ph. Jacquod and A. D. Stone, Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 3938 (2000)] which showed that the broadening of the many-body density of states is proportional to KU\sqrt{K}UK​U and hence favors minimal spin. Numerical results are presented in both limits. After evaluating the effect of fluctuations, we discuss the competition between fluctuations plus kinetic energy and the exchange energy. We finally present numerical results for specific microscopic models and relate them to our generic model of fluctuations. We discuss the different physical situations to which such models may correspond, the importance of interaction fluctuations, and hence the relevance of our results to these situations and recall an experimental setup which we proposed in an earlier work to measure the importance of interaction fluctuations on the ground-state spin of lateral quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime.
In a Hartree-Fock picture, itinerant ferromagnetism results from a competition between kinetic and exchange energy, with the magnetized state being favored at large interaction strength. In a recent paper [1] we showed that in contrast to this average effect, fluctuations of off-diagonal interaction matrix elements systematically reduce the ground-state magnetization. When the interaction dominates, the occurence of a non-zero ground-state magnetization depends on the ratio λ between average exchange energy and the fluctuation amplitude of the off-diagonal matrix elements, and a nonzero critical value λc is necessary to magnetize the ground state. We extend these results by numerical studies of λ for standard tight-binding models which indicate a regime of intermediate disorder where off-diagonal fluctuations should play an important role for ground-state magnetization. We also emphasize the presence of strong correlations between minimal eigenvalues of different magnetization blocks which further reduce the probability of a nonzero ground-state spin.
The two-dimensional Hubbard model in the presence of diagonal and off-diagonal disorder is studied at half-filling with a finite-temperature quantum Monte Carlo method. Magnetic correlations as well as the electronic compressibility are calculated to determine the behavior of local magnetic moments, the stability of antiferromagnetic long-range order (AFLRO), and properties of the disordered phase. The existence of random potentials (diagonal or ``site'' disorder) leads to a suppression of local magnetic moments which eventually destroys AFLRO. Randomness in the hopping elements (off-diagonal disorder), on the other hand, does not significantly reduce the density of local magnetic moments. For this type of disorder, at half-filling, there is no ``sign problem'' in the simulations as long as the hopping is restricted between neighbor sites on a bipartite lattice. This allows the study of sufficiently large lattices and low temperatures to perform a finite-size scaling analysis. For off-diagonal disorder, AFLRO is eventually destroyed when the fluctuations of antiferromagnetic exchange couplings exceed a critical value. The disordered phase close to the transition appears to be incompressible, and shows an increase of the uniform susceptibility at low temperatures.
We numerically investigate the transport properties of interacting spinless electrons in disordered systems. We use an efficient method which is based on the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian in the subspace of the many-particle Hilbert space which is spanned by the low-energy Slater states. Low-energy properties can be calculated with an accuracy comparable to that of exact diagonalization but for larger system sizes. The method works well in the entire parameter space, and it can handle long-range as well as short-range interactions. Using this method we calculate the combined effect of disorder and interactions on the Kubo-Greenwood conductance and on the sensitivity of the ground state energy to a twist in the boundary conditions. We find that the influence of the interactions on the transport properties is opposite for large and small disorder. In the strongly localized regime (small kinetic energy, large disorder) interactions increase the transport whereas for weak disorder (large kinetic energy) interactions decrease the transport.
We show that the crossover from the weak interaction limit towards the strong interaction limit may be accompanied by a delocalization effect in one dimensional disordered quantum models. The spin degrees of freedom are frozen and the spatial wave functions remain symmetric or antisymmetric when the strength U of a short range interaction is varied. The study concerns the excited states for two interacting particles and the ground state for a finite density of carriers. First, for two particles in a chain of length L, we establish a duality transformation mapping the behavior at weak U onto the behavior at strong U. For intermediate U, the mixing of the one body states and the interaction induced delocalization effect are maximum. Furthermore, if L ≈︂ L1 (the one particle localization length), the system becomes weakly chaotic with critical spectral statistics. This weak chaos is related to the multifractality of the interaction matrix. For two particles starting close to each other, localization is reached in two steps. Before the time t1 necessary to propagate over L1 , U de-favors the propagation. On the contrary, U favors a very slow delocalization after t1 , characterized by a log(t) spreading of the center of mass. Similarly, the curvatures of the energy levels with respect to an enclosed magnetic flux decrease as a function of U for L < L1 and increase for L > L1 . The changes of the curvatures can be described by a conductance-like single scaling parameter. Second, using the density renormalization group algorithm, we have studied the ground state energy of a finite density of spinless fermions and its change under twisted boundary conditions. For a large disorder, a charge reorganization is induced by the interaction: When the system becomes instable between the inhomogeneous configuration driven by the random potential (Anderson insulator) and the homogeneous one driven by repulsive interactions (Mott insulator), the ground state sensitivity can be enhanced by orders of magnitude. In contrast, no enhancement occurs at weaker disorder, when there are many particles on a scale L1.
A wide variety of experimental platforms, ranging from semiconductor quantum-dot arrays to moiré materials, have recently emerged as powerful quantum simulators for studying the Hubbard model and its variants. Motivated by these developments, here, we investigate a generalization of the Hubbard model which includes the effects of long-range Coulomb interactions. Working on finite-sized two-dimensional square and triangular lattices, we use exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization group calculations to probe the magnetic structure of the ground state in the strong-coupling regime, where UUU (the onsite repulsion) ≫\gg≫ ttt (the nearest-neighbor hopping). For small electron dopings above the half-filled antiferromagnet, we numerically uncover a rich variety of magnetically ordered states, and in conjunction with theoretical arguments, infer the phase diagram of the system as a function of doping and interaction strengths. In particular, we find that the inclusion of long-range Coulomb interactions induces an instability of high-spin states$\unicode{x2014}$such as the saturated Nagaoka ferromagnet$\unicode{x2014}$towards phase separation and stripe ordering. We also present proposals for the observation of some of our key findings in experiments that would shed further light on this paradigmatic strongly correlated system.