8.

4 Instability of the Nagaoka State 44 1

What is the condition for finding a triplet ground state?

c) Find the region of stability of the ferromagnetic ground state for finite
U = Us. 'Iky to judge the effect of varying €3.
d) Derive the effective Hamiltonian.

8.4 Instability of the Nagaoka State

Up to now, we have been trying to locate the paramagnetic-ferromag-
netic phase boundary. If we wish, we can delineate a further domain in-
side the ferromagnetic phase: the domain of saturated ferromagnetism.
The saturation value of the total spin is S,, = N / 2 for less than half fill-
ing, while it is Saat= (2L - N ) / 2 for more than half filling. The regime
of fully polarized ground states is often called the Nagaoka state, or
the Nagaoka phase. The name implies that we think that the Nagaoka
theorem could be extended to a finite area in the phase diagram, even
though we have a proof only for a singular point.
At the mean field level, it is easy to write down the condition for
saturation magnetization: the exchange splitting (7.27) has to exceed
the depth of the fully polarized Fermi sea

Un > EF - Eb (8.9)
where q, is the bottom of the band. This is a special case of the finite-m
Stoner criterion (7.111). The threshold value of U required by (8.9) is
larger than, but typically of the same order as, the critical V,, predicted
by the Stoner criterion (7.24). It is not unusual to find that the regime
of Nagaoka state covers a sizeable portion of the ferromagnetic phase. It
may even happen that there is nothing but saturated ferromagnetism;
this depends on the form of the density of states. We have seen an
example in Stoner theory (Problem 7.2) that the magnetization can
jump straight to its saturation value. Naturally, we should not place
too much trust in mean field theory. There is, however, evidence from
a variety of techniques that the appearance of a fully polarized ground
state need not be a rare phenomenon. We have seen that for flat-band
models with the right value of n, the spin is saturated for any U > 0.
For several non-pathological models, numerical experience indicates that
whenever the ground state is ferromagnetic, it is fully saturated. For