566 Ch.

10 The Correlated Metallic State

The AF-P phase boundary is found from (10.58). The result of a nu-
merical evaluation is shown in Fig. 10.9 (right panel). Only the regime
0.5 5 n 5 1 is shown (the full phase diagram should be symmetrical
about the n = 1 axis, and the range n < 0.5 would be covered by the
featureless paramagnetic phase). It follows1g from the perfect nesting
property that at half-filling, the AF-P boundary reaches down to U = 0.
Let us observe that the antiferromagnetic phase is confined to the rela-
tively narrow range 0.883 5 n 5 1.117. This should be contrasted with
the Hartree-Fock prediction according to which the P phase becomes
unstable against the onset of antiferromagnetism at arbitrary n if U
is large enough. Again we find that mean-field theories may grossly
overestimate the tendency to form states with long-range order. The
essential reason is that in the mean field approximation, the system is
prevented from developing short-range order, and it tries to lower its
energy by building up too much long-range order. This can be followed
in detail by analyzing the results for the large-U limit.
We consider the large-U limit at exact half-filling ( n = 1). Analytic
results can be derived by expanding in powers of t / U = l / u [lo& 2681.
The Hartree-Fock solution is obtained by fixing q = 1, and optimizing
with respect to &, with the results

In contrast, the present variational approach leads to

1 3 2 2 1 1
ndM---
u2 u4
msl M 1- - - -
u2 u4 EAFM -;-.
u3 + (10.66)

It is interesting to observe that though the central idea of the Gutzwiller

method is an explicit suppression of double occupation, we found that nd
is larger than in the Hartree-Fock calculation! The energy price of the
increased nd is paid for by the reduction of the sublattice magnetization
which lets the electrons propagate more freely from site to site, and thus
gives a lower band energy contribution. The outcome is a decreased
"The instability at arbitrarily small U was a mean-field prediction. However, just
at U + 0 correlation effects should become negligible, thus we are not surprised that
this mean-field result remains valid.