Perturbational treatment of correlation effects in the Hubbard model

In the general frame of a modified many-body perturbation theory, the single-band Hubbard model is treated in the limit of weak electron-electron interaction. In this modification the decomposition of the Hamiltonian into an effective free system and an effective perturbation is rearranged iteratively in each order of the formalism, resulting in a successive reduction of the interaction part. In comparison with conventional perturbation techniques, this means an extended range of validity. Imposing thermodynamic self-consistency, we calculate the wave-vector-dependent electronic self-energy up to second order and analyze the influence of the Coulomb correlations. Several well-known physical properties of the Hubbard model are recovered in characteristic single-particle quantities. Therefore, the effect of the band occupation n and the electron-electron repulsion U on spectral densities, band structures, densities of states, magnetization, etc. is investigated in detail. Some of the most remarkable results are: first, a splitting of the free Bloch band into two quasiparticle subbands when the coupling strength reaches moderate values. These subbands are linked by a small damping-induced background in the density of states and are separated roughly by an energy of the order of U. In addition, the upper subband is shifted to higher energies in the spectrum proportionally to U while the lower one is nearly fixed. Second, we found a paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase diagram that has a critical coupling strength $U_c$ and exhibits strong indications of a lower critical occupation number $n_c$. There is no spontaneous magnetization in the system for parameters smaller than these values. Compared with the Stoner model, one thus obtains striking improvements. In many cases our conclusions for the weak-coupling limit are qualitatively in good agreement with well-known results in the strong-correlation regime.