Lieb and hole-doped ferrimagnetism, spiral, resonating valence-bond states, and phase separation in large-U AB2 Hubbard chains

Abstract

The ground state (GS) properties of the quasi-one-dimensional AB2 Hubbard model are investigated taking the effects of charge and spin quantum fluctuations on equal footing. In the strong-coupling regime, a functional integral representation allows us to derive a low-energy Lagrangian suitable to describe the ferrimagnetic phase at half filling and the phases in the hole-doped regime. At half filling, a perturbative spin-wave analysis allows us to find the GS energy, sublattice magnetizations, and total spin per unit cell in the Lieb ferrimagnetic GS of the effective quantum Heisenberg model, in very good agreement with previous results. In the challenging hole doping regime away from half filling, we derive the corresponding Hamiltonian. Under the assumption that charge and spin quantum correlations are decoupled, the evolution of the second-order spin-wave modes in the doped regime unveils the occurrence of spatially modulated spin structures and the emergence of phase separation in the presence of resonating-valence-bond states. We also calculate the doping-dependent GS energy and total spin per unit cell, including both Zeeman and orbital contributions, in which case it is shown that the spiral ferrimagnetic order collapses at a critical hole concentration. Notably, our analytical results in the doped regime are in very good agreement with density matrix renormalization group studies, where our assumption of spin-charge decoupling is numerically supported by the formation of charge-density waves in anti-phase with the modulation of the magnetic structure.