414 Ch.

7 Itinerant Electron Magnetism

110) = cftlO), 101) = c;,lO) (10) being the vacuum), the spin-t ground state is
(unnormalized)

Id?) = (mu + d i G X 2 ) p o ) + tl0l). (7.140)

Since in the two-electron ground state Iq+) holds one electron, self-consistency

(7.141)

the same condition that derived by minimizing E .

We learn that the mean field approximation gives symmetry-breaking ground
states even for small systems. This is a spurious result43. What is more, we
found here a T = 0 phase transition: the ground state is non-magnetic for
weak coupling (U 5 2t), while it is ‘antiferromagnetic’ for sufficiently strong
coupling (U > 2t). This is to be contrasted with the exact result that the
ground state is always a singlet.
The quality of the MFA can be judged also by comparing the ground state
energy derived here

EMFA= { -2t+
__
2t2
V
i f U 5 2t
if U 2 2t
(7.142)

with the exact

€ex. - +u
- 2
- dE%) (7.143)

It is easy to see that for intermediate U , &ex. is significantly below EMFA. In

the l a r g e 4 limit &MFA M -2t2/U, while EeX. M -4t2/U. The energy scale
- t 2 / U is right but MFA predicts a too small prefactor. We can argue that of
the antiparallel spin correlations, MFA detects only the z--z correlations while
in a true singlet, the 2 and y components also contribute.
7.7. a) We seek the T = 0 gap by expanding the ground state energy

in powers of A

E(A) M E(0)+ - 1 - -
U
A2

l r ) ( + 4 ‘
A4 OCc’ 1
(fk+Q - f k ) 3

43Except for ferromagnetism where the order parameter commutes with the Hamil-
(7.145)

tonian. We mentioned this earlier.