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. © 1996 The American Physical Society.