Itinerant magnetism in Hubbard models with long-range interactions

TL;DR

This paper explores how long-range Coulomb interactions affect magnetic phases in Hubbard models on 2D lattices, revealing new magnetic states and phase transitions relevant for quantum simulation experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of long-range interactions in Hubbard models, uncovering new magnetic phases and phase separation phenomena through numerical simulations.

Findings

Long-range interactions induce phase separation and stripe order.

Rich variety of magnetic states near half-filling.

Proposals for experimental observation of magnetic phases.

Abstract

A wide variety of experimental platforms, ranging from semiconductor quantum-dot arrays to moir\'e materials, have recently emerged as powerful quantum simulators for studying the Hubbard model and its variants. Motivated by these developments, here, we investigate a generalization of the Hubbard model which includes the effects of long-range Coulomb interactions. Working on finite-sized two-dimensional square and triangular lattices, we use exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization group calculations to probe the magnetic structure of the ground state in the strong-coupling regime, where $U$ (the onsite repulsion) $\gg$ $t$ (the nearest-neighbor hopping). For small electron dopings above the half-filled antiferromagnet, we numerically uncover a rich variety of magnetically ordered states, and in conjunction with theoretical arguments, infer the phase diagram of the system as a function of doping and interaction strengths. In particular, we find that the inclusion of long-range Coulomb interactions induces an instability of high-spin states$\unicode{x2014}$such as the saturated Nagaoka ferromagnet$\unicode{x2014}$towards phase separation and stripe ordering. We also present proposals for the observation of some of our key findings in experiments that would shed further light on this paradigmatic strongly correlated system.