Crossover from two- to three-dimensional critical behavior for nearly antiferromagnetic itinerant electrons.

Abstract

The crossover from two- to three-dimensional critical behavior of nearly antiferromagnetic itinerant electrons is studied in a regime where the inter-plane single-particle motion of electrons is quantum-mechanically incoherent because of thermal fluctuations. This is a relevant regime for very anisotropic materials like the cuprates. The problem is studied within the Two-Particle Self-Consistent approach (TPSC), that has been previously shown to give a quantitative description of Monte Carlo data for the Hubbard model. It is shown that TPSC belongs to the $n\rightarrow \infty $ limit of the $O\left( n\right) $ universality class. However, contrary to the usual approaches, cutoffs appear naturally in the microscopic TPSC theory so that parameter-free calculations can be done for Hubbard models with arbitrary band structure. A general discussion of universality in the renormalized-classical crossover from $d=2$ to $d=3$ is also given.