8.

4 Instability of the Nagaoka State 445

This is easy to verify: if finds a doubly occupied site, it acts like

p l d ) = [l - (1 - q)fitA~.](d)
= qld). On the other hand, P has no effect
on singly occupied or empty sites. Thus the structure of the finite4
trial ground state

IQSKA(V)) = P la) = nil- (1 - q)fijtfij.~C i L C k F t l N ) (8.18)

j

is similar to that of the uncorrelated I@), except for the systematic sup-
pression of double occupation. The variational parameter q is obtained
from demanding that the energy

(8.19)

be minimum. In Ch. 9 we will realize that what we are doing here,

is the application of the Gutzwiller variational technique to the single-
spin-flip problem; the operator p is the Gutzwiller projector. Ch. 9
will bring a more detailed argument for using such a variational ap-
proach. The presently considered trial state (8.16), and its finite4 ver-
sion (8.18), were introduced by Shastry, Krishnamurty and Anderson
(SKA) in [359]. In much of our discussion, we follow [152].
The f i n i t e 4 state (8.18) is flexible: it can be optimized by the right
choice of q. In contrast, it is clear that we have to set q = 0 in the limit
U = 00, thus (8.16) is a trial state without a variational parameter.
The energy E ( q ) ,and thus the variational estimate for the energy
change due to the single spin flip, can be evaluated exactly2'. The
derivation is given in Appendix B; here we quote the results, and com-
ment on their physical meaning.
The general structure of the spin-flip energy (8.14) is
AE(n, V ) = A& + AE, + AEint
= ( K t - E ~ a g+
) K1+ AEint , (8.20)
21 We cannot speak about the exact determination of the spin-flip energy because
the trial state (8.18) is not the exact single-spin-flip state. We merely mean that
once the trial state is accepted, its consequences can be worked out in closed form
without further approximation. This feature makes the SKA states almost unique
among the Gutzwiller states. The small-S Gutzwiller states of the Hubbard model
have many doubly occupied sites which leads to great technical difficulties (see Chs.
9, 10, and Appendix C).