492 Ch.

8 Ferromagnetism in Hubbard Models

d) To get an insight into the competition between the ferromagnetic and

the non-magnetic ground state, let us envisage5' the following situation: Let
U3 = co,U large but finite, and €3 smaller than U but still large compared to
t and tl . The singlet eigenvalue problem is restricted to the subspace spanned
by ( A ) ,( B ) ,and \GI). Expanding in t 2 and tl we get

(8.69)

(we neglected a term of the order t z ( t i ) ' / ( U t 3 ) which would in any case drop
out when writing down J ) . To the same order

(8.70)

Under the assumptions made above, the electrons are essentially confined to
the sites 1 and 2, and the effective Hamiltonian can be written as JS1 . S Z .
The exchange coupling can be identified from the singlet-triplet splitting

(8.71)

Thus a second-order and a third-order process are competing with each other.
The second-order term is the usual antiferromagnetic coupling due to virtual
hopping to a nearest-neighbour site. The third-order term describes a ring
exchange process: as shown on the right-hand side of Fig. 8.18, three consec-
utive hoppings around the triangular plaquette effect the interchange of the
two spins. The sign of this term depends on the sign of t 2 and thus we can
control via the appropriate choice of t 2 whether the coupling is ferromagnetic
or antiferromagnetic. The arising of ferromagnetism in Tasaki's toy model is
now seen to result from the fact that choosing a large U suppresses the nearest-
neighbour antiferromagnetic process sufficiently so that the usually negligible
ring-exchange processes take over.
We may be worried about the behaviour at small €3 where (8.71) diverges
even though we know form our previous results that the singlet-triplet splitting
is perfectly well-behaved. For convenience, let us consider the limit U + 00.
The difference of (8.68) and (8.62)

Au+m = f:in, - EIS;in,= --tg + -2l €3 +( t 2 ) ' + 8tq7 - 7

+
(€3 - t2)' 8tq
(8.72)

51Herewe paraphrase the argument of (3231 for the toy model.