7.

6 Spin Density Waves 365

* ..
\
\
.
\
1
I' !

*.....

\
\

\.*

\
..................................... .... ...............................................

....
-k
L 'a
1 -3 !a
k

Figure 7.3: Illustration of the mean field treatment of two-sublattice SDW order.
The effective field doubles the periodicity and therefore halves the Brillouin zone.
The tight binding band of non-interacting electrons (dashed line) has to be folded
back into a new zone, giving rise to an upper band (dotted line). The effective
field acts l i e hybridization, producing the lower and upper SDW bands (continuous
lines), separated by the SDW gap. We can envisage a similar scenario for less than
half filling when k F lies inside the new zone, and only the corresponding part of the
lower SDW band is occupied (thick line; see Sec. 7.6.4).

All this was easy to visualize in the one-dimensional case, but the
analogous statements hold for a D-dimensional hypercubic lattice.
These ideas are embodied in RSDWwhich is bilinear in the fermion
operators, thus easily diagonalizable. The last obstacle is that part of it
is in direct-space, and part of it in momentum-space representation. We
find it convenient to rewrite the entire Hamiltonian in terms of k-space
operators.
For each k E NBZ, k Q is outside the NBZ. In the spirit of +
the reduced zone scheme, we ascribe the state created by also to cL+~
k, by introducing the new fermion creation operator dL = The cL+~.