160 Ch.

4 Mott llansition and Hubbard Model

(such as the D-dimensional cubic lattice which we will study most of

the time) the single-orbital model has only one band; for non-Bravais
lattices, it has several bands. The latter possibility will be illustrated
in Problems 4.3-4.
The zero-temperature behaviour of the Hubbard model is governed
by two parameters: the relative interaction strength U / t , and the elec-
tron density n = N / L . Here N denotes the total number of electrons,
and L is the number of lattice sites (for non-Bravais lattices, the num-
ber of unit cells). For the single-orbital model, 0 5 n 5 2; n = 1
belongs to half-filling. One often uses U/W instead of U/t, W being
the bandwidth.
In a Ioose manner of speaking, the expression for the grand-canonical
potential

(4.17)

is also referred to as the Hubbard model. Here p is the chemical poten-

tial, and lir = &, fikg is the operator of the totat number of particles.
This form is suitable if we wish to work in the 4L-dimensional Hilbert
space comprising the states with all possible 0 5 N 5 2L values of the
total number of electrons. The Hilbert space for a fixed number N of
the electrons has the much lower dimensionality CCL.
The Hubbard model is the most-studied lattice fermion model. There
are other lattice models of considerable interest which we will briefly dis-
cuss in later chapters: the periodic Anderson model allows us to study
homogeneous valence mixing, and the arising of a heavy Fermi liquid
in certain f-electron systems (Ch. 11);two-band and many-band Hub-
bard modeIs might be relevant for itinerant ferromagnetism (Ch. 7) and
maybe for high-temperature superconductivity; and we have already in-
troduced (Ch. 1) a spinless fermion model for Wigner crystallization.
A common feature of lattice models is the existence of certain magic
values of the band filling where new correlated phases may appear. We
expect a Mott insulator only if n is an integer; Wigner crystallization
was associated with n = 1/2, etc. Loosely speaking, at a magic filling
a density wave of the electron system is in registry with the underlying