The Hubbard Model: Introduction and Selected Rigorous Results

Abstract

The Hubbard model is a "highly oversimplified model" for electrons in a solid which interact with each other through extremely short ranged repulsive (Coulomb) interaction. The Hamiltonian of the Hubbard model consists of two pieces; H_hop which describes quantum mechanical hopping of electrons, and Hint which describes nonlinear repulsive interaction. Either H_hop or H_int alone is easy to analyze, and does not favor any specific order. But their sum H=H_hop+H_int is believed to exhibit various nontrivial phenomena including metal-insulator transition, antiferromagnetism, ferrimagnetism, ferromagnetism, Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid, and superconductivity. It is believed that we can find various interesting "universality classes" of strongly interacting electron systems by studying the idealized Hubbard model. In the present article we review some mathematically rigorous results on the Hubbard model which shed light on "physics" of this fascinating model. We mainly concentrate on magnetic properties of the model at its ground states. We discuss Lieb-Mattis theorem on the absence of ferromagnetism in one dimension, Koma-Tasaki bounds on decay of correlations at finite temperatures in two-dimensions, Yamanaka-Oshikawa-Affleck theorem on low-lying excitations in one-dimension, Lieb's important theorem for half-filled model on a bipartite lattice, Kubo-Kishi bounds on the charge and superconducting susceptibilities of half-filled models at finite temperatures, and three rigorous examples of saturated ferromagnetism due to Nagaoka, Mielke, and Tasaki. We have tried to make the article accessible to nonexperts by describing basic definitions and elementary materials in detail.