8.

2 Exact High-Spin Ground States 439

a distinguished role to quarter-filling. Though the reason here is almost

trivial, it seems to have a more general validity: even higher-dimensional
lattices built of triangular blocks seem to possess a particularly stable
pocket of ferromagnetism around n = 1/4.
We can actually get an idea of the €0-dependenceof the stabilization
energy of the ferromagnetic state from (8.72) in the solution to Problem
8.2. The lesson is that the perturbative result (8.6) goes over smoothly
into an expression of the order of the hopping energy. Since for medium
or small eo the electrons are no longer confined to the lower chain (Fig.
8.6, left), or to sites 1 and 2 in terms of the toy model, we cannot use
an effective Heisenberg model, However, it should be still possible to
write down an effective t-J model, where the qualitative behaviour of
J is something like (8.72).
The “least decorated” version of the triangular strip (which is not
covered by the arguments of [392] or [323]) was introduced by Miiller-
Hartmann [297]. It is obtained from the model shown in Fig. 8.6 (left) by
setting t 2 = ti, €0 = 0, and U = U‘. Interpreting the model as the tl-tz-
U Hubbard chain, we find another example of how the no-go theorem by
Lieb and Mattis [245] can be circumvented. The point is that switching
on the second-neighbour hopping, we have short loops which means an
essential deviation from strict one-dimensionality. At the same time,
the lattice ceases to be bipartite. A Nagaoka argument [265] shows
that the single-hole ground state is fully polarized if t2 is positive17.
Let us remember that we met the tight-binding term in Problem 4.3.b
where we found that the dispersion has two degenerate minima if t2 >
-tr/4. Though the proven existence of a Nagaoka state shows that the
model can become ferromagnetic also for 0 < tZ < -t1/4, the possibility
of a double-well dispersion seems to help18 the FM phase to extend
over an especially large region of the parameter space: it appears that
(for sufficiently large U ) the model can become ferromagnetic at all
fillings n < 1/2, for a broad range of t 2 > 0. In particular, one finds

“We can gauge t l to be either positive or negative. Here we fix t l < 0.

“Though any naive application of the Stoner criterion should be avoided, it is
certainly suggestive that the DOS diverges not only at the band edges but also
somewhere inside the band (Fig. 4.13, right). Later, we will realize that the strongly
asymmetrical shape of the DOS is more important than the presence of a divergency.