4.

3 Hubbard Model 159

BCS model Hamiltonian) which describes a net electron-electron attrac-

tion due to processes which are not characterized in detail. Following
this interpretation, the model is used for the description of certain su-
perconductors.
In contrast to the Hubbard on-site interaction, the true Coulomb
interaction is long-ranged. A realistic Hamiltonian should contain lots
of intersite terms. The pair terms12 include, in addition to the di-
rect Coulomb and (ferromagnetic) exchange interactions, also Coulomb-
assisted hopping processes. We should be aware that the inclusion of
these terms can lead to new physics. However, this is not systematically
explored yet and therefore we will usually stick to the simple Hubbard
model (4.10).A trivial point: we may be worried that if the long-range
part of the Coulomb force is “switched on”, the system should explode,
because it seem to carry a macroscopic total charge. To avoid such a
catastrophy, it is understood that whichever electron number we are con-
sidering, charge neutrality is guaranteed by a compensating background
charge which comes from ions which are not explicitely described in the
model.
The band term may be rewritten in its (diagonal) Bloch representa-
tion
xband = ckfiko (4.16)
ku
without making the form of r(k) explicit. r(k) is easy to express for
the nearest-neighbour tight binding model (4.13)but generally, we may
admit any band structure r(k) in the Hubbard model, requiring only
that 3tu is expressed in terms of the corresponding Wannier operators.
We take it for granted that a tight binding parametrization for the
band can be found, even if it may necessitate the inclusion of farther-
neighbour hoppings. On the other hand, it was somewhat flimsy to
assume that only one band appears in the Bloch representation. One
customarily speaks of the oneband (or singleband) Hubbard model and
writes %!band either as in (4.13)or as in (4.16). However, recent work
on Hubbard models on non-Bravais lattices made us conscious of the
fact that what we really mean is the singleorbital Hubbard model in
which there is only one Wannier state for each site. For Bravais lattices
12Thnv will be discussed in Sec. 5.3.