348 Ch.

7 Itinerant Electron Magnetism

mean-field theory of a phase transition is supposed to give an approximate

description of the behaviour of macroscopically large systems.
For a macroscopic system, the fully symmetrical state is realized only at
sufficiently high temperatures, i.e., above the highest ordering temperature.
Upon cooling, interactions cause the system to break one, or several symmetries
of the Hamiltonian6. “Breaking a s y m m e t y ” means that there are symmetry
operations under which the Hamiltonian is invariant but the state of the system
i s not. The symmetry-breaking nature of the state is signalled by non-zero
results for certain expectation values which should exactly vanish if the state
were symmetrical. In our present case, the symmetry breaking is associated
with the appearance of a non-vanishing magnetization (Sj) in a system whose
Hamilton operator is spin-rotationally invariant. Rotating all the spins by the
same angle, the Hamiltonian is taken into itself, but the vector (Sj)turns into
a different direction, i.e., the state has been changed.
It may be mentioned that the phenomenon we are discussing is often called
spontaneous symmetry breaking. It is “spontaneous” because we did not put
into the Hamiltonian any symmetry-breaking term which could have reduced
the symmetry of the energy expression to that of the ordered state.
There are cases in which even a macroscopic system retains full symmetry
at all temperatures, or at least at all non-zero temperatures. We mention two
basic possibilities.
First, it may seem obvious that a non-interacting system does not order,
since it looks like an assembly of independent finite systems. However, if we
think a bit more carefully, we realize that “non-interacting” is not quite the
same as “independent”: quantum statistics also induces correlations, It turns
out that a free Fermi system is indeed non-ordering but a three-dimensional
free Bose gas condenses at a finite transition temperature.
Second, in low dimensions, thermal and/or quantum fluctuations can pre-
vent long-range order even in strongly interacting systems. The breaking of
continuous symmetries at finite temperatures is ruled out for one- and two-
dimensional systems by the powerful Mermin-Wagner theorem, assuming that
the interaction falls off sufficiently rapidly with increasing interparticle distance
[269]. The statement covers the isotropic spin models, as well as interacting
electron models which do not include spin-orbit coupling or dipole-dipole inter-
action and thus cannot describe magnetic anisotropy. The theorem is certainly
valid for the Hubbard model which has a zero-range interaction, thus we can
be sure that one- and two-dimensional Hubbard models are not magnetically
ordered at any finite temperature7. The same holds for the extended Hubbard

‘See [22] for a thorough discussion of the concept of symmetry breaking.

7We have to be very cautious in interpreting this result: the non-existence of
magnetic order at finite T does not necessarily mean that there cannot be a magnetic