8.

2 Exact High-Spin Ground States 437

third-order effective Hamiltonian describes these third-order processes

Obviously, the sign of t2 controls the sign of 53. In particular, the

coupling is ferromagnetic if t2 > 0.

$ 0 0 . 1 t
Figure 8.7: Ring exchange in the toy model proceeds via the top-site orbital which
is kept empty by the large on-site energy €3. A sequence of three hopping processes
exchanges the spins at the base of the triangle.

In our previous discussions of the exchange process (Sec. 2.2 and

Sec. 5.1.6), we have met the problem of whether kinetic exchange is
possible when the electrons are so strongly interacting that they can
never be at the same place. The usual second-order contribution t 2 / U N

is suppressed but it is still possible to exchange the spins by moving them

in a loop. For this ring exchange process one needs empty orbitals where
one electron can reside while the other is passing by. This is provided
by the top site of the triangle which we kept empty by introducing a
large ~ 3 .
If U is not kept so artificially big, there is also a contribution from
the familiar second-order process

The overall sign of the exchange coupling is decided by the competi-

tion between antiferromagnetic pair exchange, and ferromagnetic ring
exchange.
The toy model can be extended into a quasi-one-dimensionallattice
model: it is essentially Tasaki’s model (Fig. 8.5), with the extra feature