9.

1 Minimum Polarity Principle 499

9.1 Minimum Polarity Principle

We were repeatedly arguing that the uncorrelated Fermi sea, i.e., the
paramagnetic band ground state

has a lot of charge fluctuations in it, e.g., for a half-filled, nondegenerate

band, on the average 1/4th of all lattice sites are doubly occupied, and
1/4th are empty. In other words, if we were making a “snapshot” of IFS),
to “see where the electrons are”, typically we would find the situation3
shown in the left-hand picture of Fig. 9.1:

3-t 3-
3--r -It J-
t t 3-t
4 3-t t
a. U = O b. intermediate U c. u+oo

Figure 9.1: The evolution of the ground state of the half-filled Hubbard model, il-
lustrated by “snapshots” of the electron distribution. Increasing U suppresses charge
fluctuations.

If we were using IFS) as a trial ground state for the Hubbard model
(9.1), the ground state energy densityjsite would be (cf. (4.9), and Fig.
4.3)

where 2 is the average band energy per lattice site. Now we set, the
energy zero at the centre-of-mass of the entire band thus for any partial
( n < 2) filling, z < 0.
31n the snapshots in Fig. 9.1 the number of each species of lattice site was chosen
to correspond to the average concentration. This is only for illustration: in any finite
cluster taken from the lattice, the numbers may fluctuate.