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Spin stiffnesses and stability of magnetic order in the lightly doped two-dimensional Hubbard model

Demetrio Vilardi1, Pietro M. Bonetti1,2, and Walter Metzner1

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Phys. Rev. B 112, 245149 – Published 19 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/x7qr-f6lm

Abstract

We analyze the density dependence of the spin stiffnesses and the stability of magnetic order with respect to quantum fluctuations in the two-dimensional Hubbard model close to half-filling. The stiffnesses are computed from the spin susceptibility obtained from a random-phase approximation in a magnetically ordered state. For a sizable next-to-nearest-neighbor hopping amplitude and a moderate Hubbard interaction, the mean-field ground state is a Néel antiferromagnet in the electron-doped regime at and above half-filling and a planar circular spiral state in the hole-doped regime below half-filling. Upon electron doping, the Néel stiffness decreases smoothly and not very steeply. By contrast, the in-plane and out-of-plane stiffnesses in the spiral state drop abruptly at half-filling. The out-of-plane stiffness even drops to zero and then increases again very slowly upon increasing hole doping. At finite temperatures, the Néel-to-spiral transition is shifted into the hole-doped regime, the stiffnesses are continuous functions of the density, and they vanish at the transition. For small hole doping, the spin stiffnesses describe the quantum fluctuations only in a small momentum range, which shrinks to zero upon approaching half-filling. Using the above results, we show that the quantum ground state of the lightly electron-doped Hubbard model remains Néel ordered, while quantum fluctuations probably destroy the spiral long-range order in the hole-doped regime, giving rise to a quantum disordered state with a spin gap.

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Phys. Rev. B 112, 245149– Published 19 December, 2025
  • Received 24 April 2025
  • Accepted 25 November 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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