Disorder and Impurities in Hubbard-Antiferromagnets

We study the influence of disorder and randomly distributed impurities on the properties of correlated antiferromagnets. To this end the Hubbard model with (i) random potentials, (ii) random hopping elements, and (iii) randomly distributed values of interaction is treated using quantum Monte Carlo and dynamical mean-field theory. In cases (i) and (iii) weak disorder can lead to an enhancement of antiferromagnetic (AF) order: in case (i) by a disorder-induced delocalization, in case (iii) by binding of free carriers at the impurities. For strong disorder or large impurity concentration antiferromagnetism is eventually destroyed. Random hopping leaves the local moment stable but AF order is suppressed by local singlet formation. Random potentials induce impurity states within the charge gap until it eventually closes. Impurities with weak interaction values shift the Hubbard gap to a density off half-filling. In both cases an antiferromagnetic phase without charge gap is observed.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, latex using vieweg.sty (enclosed); typos corrected, references updated; to appear in "Advances in Solid State Physics", Vol. 3

Magnetic Correlations in the Two Dimensional Anderson-Hubbard Model

The two dimensional Hubbard model in the presence of diagonal and off-diagonal disorder is studied at half filling with a finite temperature quantum Monte Carlo method. Magnetic correlations as well as the electronic compressibility are calculated to determine the behavior of local magnetic moments, the stability of antiferromagnetic long range order (AFLRO), and properties of the disordered phase. The existence of random potentials (diagonal or ``site'' disorder) leads to a suppression of local magnetic moments which eventually destroys AFLRO. Randomness in the hopping elements (off-diagonal disorder), on the other hand, does not significantly reduce the density of local magnetic moments. For this type of disorder, at half-filling, there is no ``sign-problem'' in the simulations as long as the hopping is restricted between neighbor sites on a bipartite lattice. This allows the study of sufficiently large lattices and low temperatures to perform a finite-size scaling analysis. For off-diagonal disorder AFLRO is eventually destroyed when the fluctuations of antiferromagnetic exchange couplings exceed a critical value. The disordered phase close to the transition appears to be incompressible and shows an increase of the uniform susceptibility at low temperatures.Comment: 10 pages, REVTeX, 14 figures included using psfig.st

Disorder-enhanced delocalization and local-moment quenching in a disordered antiferromagnet

The interplay of disorder and spin-fluctuation effects in a disordered antiferromagnet is studied. In the weak-disorder regime (W \le U), while the energy gap decreases rapidly with disorder, the sublattice magnetization, including quantum corrections, is found to remain essentially unchanged in the strong correlation limit. Magnon energies and Neel temperature are enhanced by disorder in this limit. A single paradigm of disorder-enhanced delocalization qualitatively accounts for all these weak disorder effects. Vertex corrections and magnon damping, which appear only at order (W/U)^4, are also studied. With increasing disorder a crossover is found at W \sim U, characterized by a rapid decrease in sublattice magnetization due to quenching of local moments, and formation of spin vacancies. The latter suggests a spin-dilution behavior, which is indeed observed in softened magnon modes, lowering of Neel temperature, and enhanced transverse spin fluctuations.Comment: 12 pages, includes 8 postscript figures. To appear in Physical Review B. References adde

Two-Particle-Self-Consistent Approach for the Hubbard Model

Even at weak to intermediate coupling, the Hubbard model poses a formidable challenge. In two dimensions in particular, standard methods such as the Random Phase Approximation are no longer valid since they predict a finite temperature antiferromagnetic phase transition prohibited by the Mermin-Wagner theorem. The Two-Particle-Self-Consistent (TPSC) approach satisfies that theorem as well as particle conservation, the Pauli principle, the local moment and local charge sum rules. The self-energy formula does not assume a Migdal theorem. There is consistency between one- and two-particle quantities. Internal accuracy checks allow one to test the limits of validity of TPSC. Here I present a pedagogical review of TPSC along with a short summary of existing results and two case studies: a) the opening of a pseudogap in two dimensions when the correlation length is larger than the thermal de Broglie wavelength, and b) the conditions for the appearance of d-wave superconductivity in the two-dimensional Hubbard model.Comment: Chapter in "Theoretical methods for Strongly Correlated Systems", Edited by A. Avella and F. Mancini, Springer Verlag, (2011) 55 pages. Misprint in Eq.(23) corrected (thanks D. Bergeron

Magnetism in the Hubbard model: An effective spin Hamiltonian approach

We present an approach to the magnetic properties of the half-filled Hubbard model, based on an approximate mapping of its low-energy transverse spin excitations on to those of an effective underlying Heisenberg model, but with effective spin interactions which are self-consistently determined and not confined solely to nearest-neighbor couplings. The mapping is exact in strong-coupling and is found to be accurate over a very wide range of interaction strengths, down to weak coupling. At zero temperature, it permits ready evaluation at finite U of the one-loop effects of zero-point spin fluctuations on, e.g., the sublattice magnetization. At finite temperatures, thermodynamic properties of the system in the thermal paramagnet are studied via a physically transparent Onsager reaction field approach, which amounts to a self-consistent treatment of paramagnetic spin correlations. This is central not only in recovering the correct dimensionality dependence of antiferromagnetic long-ranged order, but also for the d=3 case of primary interest here yields a Néel temperature in close agreement with known strong- and weak-coupling limits. Spin correlation functions and magnetic susceptibilities also show very good agreement with quantum Monte Carlo calculations over an appreciable temperature range in which the low-lying transverse spin excitations are thermally dominant

A local moment approach to the Anderson model

A theory is developed for the single-particle spectra of the symmetric Anderson model, in which local moments are introduced explicitly from the outset. Dynamical coupling of single-particle processes to low-energy spin-flip excitations leads, within the framework of a two-self-energy description, to a theory in which both low- and high-energy spectral features are simultaneously captured, while correctly preserving Fermi liquid behaviour at low energies. The atomic limit, non-interacting limit and strong-coupling behaviour of the spectrum are each recovered. For strong coupling in particular, both the exponential asymptotics of the Kondo resonance and concomitant many-body broadening of the Hubbard satellite bands are shown to arise naturally within the present approach

Antiferromagnetic phase of the d=infinity Hubbard model

We describe a new approach to the ground state antiferromagnetic phase of the infinite-dimensional Hubbard model. The theory recovers correctly both the strong coupling Heisenberg limit at 1/2 filling and the t-J limit in the one-hole sector, appears applicable over a wide U range, and is readily extended to finite dimensions

Spin interactions in an Anderson-Hubbard model

We study the magnetic properties of a site-disordered Anderson-Hubbard model at half-filling on a simple cubic lattice, via a mapping of its low-frequency transverse spin excitations onto those of an effective underlying Heisenberg model with self-consistently determined exchange couplings. Exact in the strong-coupling limit, the mapping remains accurate over the dominant region of the phase plane where the ground state is a disordered antiferromagnet. The effect of disorder and interaction strength on the resultant exchange couplings is examined in detail, and rationalized microscopically. Frustration is found to occur, even within the antiferromagnetic phase, although the ground state is shown to be stable with respect to zero-point quantum spin fluctuations. To probe finite-temperature magnetic properties, an Onsager reaction-field approach to the effective Heisenberg model in the paramagnetic phase is employed. We focus on the effect of disorder on the Néel temperature and the nature of the thermal transition to the ordered phase

The metal-insulator transition in disordered tungsten bronzes. Results of an Anderson-Mott-Hubbard model

To understand the electronic properties - in particular the metal -insulator transition (MIT) - of cubic tungsten bronzes NaxWO3 and NaxTayW1-yO3, a microscopic model incorporating electron interactions and correlated disorder is presented and treated at the mean-field level of unrestricted Hartree-Fock. The conduction band is found to exhibit a pseudogap at the Fermi level for sufficiently large interaction strengths, in agreement with experiment. The pseudogap has a profound effect on localization properties of Fermi-level states and the position of the MIT. The lower band-edge states are found to be essentially two-dimensional, with a progressive crossover to three-dimensional character with increasing energy. An exception to this behaviour occurs in the pseudogap, where the states are virtually two-dimensional