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# The history of the cosmological constant problem 11footnote 1Invited talk at the XVIIIth IAP Colloquium: Observational and theoretical results on the accelerating universe, July 1-5 2002, Paris, France

## 1 Introduction

One of the contributions in the famous volume Albert Einstein: Philosopher–Scientist  is an article by George E. Lemaître entitled “The Cosmological Constant.” In the introduction he says: “The history of science provides many instances of discoveries which have been made for reasons which are no longer considered satisfactory. It may be that the discovery of the cosmological constant is such a case.” When the book appeared in 1949 – at the occasion of Einstein’s seventieth birthday – Lemaître could not be fully aware of how right he was, how profound the cosmological constant problem really is, especially since he was not a quantum physicist.

During this week we shall hear why we are indeed confronted with a deep mystery and the current evidence for the unexpected finding that the recent ( $`z<1`$) Universe is dominated by an exotic homogeneous energy density with negative pressure will be summarized by various speakers. The simplest candidate for this exotic energy density is a cosmological term in Einstein’s field equations, a possibility that has been considered during all the history of relativistic cosmology. The organizers of this interesting meeting asked me to review the main aspects of the history of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term, from its introduction in 1917 up to the point when it became widely clear that we are facing a deep mystery.

## 2 Einstein’s original motivation of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term

The cosmological term was introduced by Einstein when he applied general relativity for the first time to cosmology. In his paper of 1917  he found the first cosmological solution of a consistent theory of gravity. In spite of its drawbacks this bold step can be regarded as the beginning of modern cosmology. It is still interesting to read this paper about which Einstein says: “I shall conduct the reader over the road that I have myself travelled, rather a rough and winding road, because otherwise I cannot hope that he will take much interest in the result at the end of the journey.” In a letter to P. Ehrenfest on 4 February 1917 Einstein wrote about his attempt: “I have again perpetrated something relating to the theory of gravitation that might endanger me of being committed to a madhouse. (Ich habe wieder etwas verbrochen in der Gravitationstheorie, was mich ein wenig in Gefahr bringt, in ein Tollhaus interniert zu werden.)” .

In his attempt Einstein assumed – and this was completely novel – that space is globally closed, because he then believed that this was the only way to satisfy Mach’s principle, in the sense that the metric field should be determined uniquely by the energy-momentum tensor. In these years and for quite some time Mach’s ideas on the origin of inertia played an important role in Einstein’s thinking. This may even be the primary reason that he turned so soon after the completion of general relativity to cosmology. Einstein was, in particular, convinced that isolated masses cannot impose a structure on space at infinity. It is along these lines that he postulated a universe that is spatially finite and closed, a universe in which no boundary conditions are needed. Einstein was actually thinking about the problem regarding the choice of boundary conditions at infinity already in spring 1916. In a letter to Michele Besso from 14 May 1916 he also mentions the possibility of the world being finite. A few month later he expanded on this in letters to Willem de Sitter.

In addition, Einstein assumed that the Universe was static. This was not unreasonable at the time, because the relative velocities of the stars as observed were small. (Recall that astronomers only learned later that spiral nebulae are independent star systems outside the Milky Way. This was definitely established when in 1924 Hubble found that there were Cepheid variables in Andromeda and also in other galaxies. Five years later he announced the recession of galaxies.)

These two assumptions were, however, not compatible with Einstein’s original field equations. For this reason, Einstein added the famous $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term, which is compatible with the principles of general relativity, in particular with the energy-momentum law $`_\nu T^{\mu \nu }=0`$ for matter. The modified field equations in standard notation (see, e.g., ) and signature $`(+)`$ are

$$G_{\mu \nu }=8\pi GT_{\mu \nu }+\mathrm{\Lambda }g_{\mu \nu }.$$
(1)
The cosmological term is, in four dimensions, the only possible complication of the field equations if no higher than second order derivatives of the metric are allowed (Lovelock theorem). This remarkable uniqueness is one of the most attractive features of general relativity. (In higher dimensions additional terms satisfying this requirement are allowed.)

For the static Einstein universe the field equations (1) imply the two relations

$$8\pi G\rho =\frac{1}{a^2}=\mathrm{\Lambda },$$
(2)
where $`\rho `$ is the mass density of the dust filled universe (zero pressure) and $`a`$ is the radius of curvature. (We remark, in passing, that the Einstein universe is the only static dust solution; one does not have to assume isotropy or homogeneity. Its instability was demonstrated by Lemaître in 1927.) Einstein was very pleased by this direct connection between the mass density and geometry, because he thought that this was in accord with Mach’s philosophy. (His enthusiasm for what he called Mach’s principle later decreased. In a letter to F.Pirani he wrote in 1954: “As a matter of fact, one should no longer speak of Mach’s principle at all. (Von dem Machschen Prinzip sollte man eigentlich überhaupt nicht mehr sprechen”.) )

Einstein concludes with the following sentences:

> “In order to arrive at this consistent view, we admittedly had to introduce an extension of the field equations of gravitation which is not justified by our actual knowledge of gravitation. It has to be emphasized, however, that a positive curvature of space is given by our results, even if the supplementary term is not introduced. That term is necessary only for the purpose of making possible a quasi-static distribution of matter, as required by the fact of the small velocities of the stars.”

## 3 From static to expanding world models

In the same year, 1917, de Sitter discovered a completely different static cosmological model which also incorporated the cosmological constant, but was anti-Machian, because it contained no matter . The model had one very interesting property: For light sources moving along static world lines there is a gravitational redshift, which became known as the de Sitter effect. This was thought to have some bearing on the redshift results obtained by Slipher. Because the fundamental (static) worldlines in this model are not geodesic, a freely- falling particle released by any static observer will be seen by him to accelerate away, generating also local velocity (Doppler) redshifts corresponding to peculiar velocities. In the second edition of his book , published in 1924, Eddington writes about this:

> “de Sitter’s theory gives a double explanation for this motion of recession; first there is a general tendency to scatter (…); second there is a general displacement of spectral lines to the red in distant objects owing to the slowing down of atomic vibrations (…), which would erroneously be interpreted as a motion of recession.”

I do not want to enter into all the confusion over the de Sitter universe. This has been described in detail elsewhere (see, e.g., ). An important discussion of the redshift of galaxies in de Sitter’s model by H. Weyl  in 1923 should, however, be mentioned. Weyl introduced an expanding version of the de Sitter model222I recall that the de Sitter model has many different interpretations, depending on the class of fundamental observers that is singled out.. For small distances his result reduced to what later became known as the Hubble law.

Until about 1930 almost everybody knew that the Universe was static, in spite of the two fundamental papers by Friedmann  in 1922 and 1924 and Lemaître’s independent work  in 1927. These path breaking papers were in fact largely ignored. The history of this early period has – as is often the case – been distorted by some widely read documents. Einstein too accepted the idea of an expanding Universe only much later. After the first paper of Friedmann, he published a brief note claiming an error in Friedmann’s work; when it was pointed out to him that it was his error, Einstein published a retraction of his comment, with a sentence that luckily was deleted before publication: “\[Friedmann’s paper\] while mathematically correct is of no physical significance”. In comments to Lemaître during the Solvay meeting in 1927, Einstein again rejected the expanding universe solutions as physically unacceptable. According to Lemaître, Einstein was telling him: “Vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable”. On the other hand, I found in the archive of the ETH many years ago a postcard of Einstein to Weyl from 1923 with the following interesting sentence: “If there is no quasi-static world, then away with the cosmological term”. This shows once more that history is not as simple as it is often presented.

It also is not well-known that Hubble interpreted his famous results on the redshift of the radiation emitted by distant ‘nebulae’ in the framework of the de Sitter model. He wrote:

> “The outstanding feature however is that the velocity-distance relation may represent the de Sitter effect and hence that numerical data may be introduced into the discussion of the general curvature of space. In the de Sitter cosmology, displacements of the spectra arise from two sources, an apparent slowing down of atomic vibrations and a tendency to scatter. The latter involves a separation and hence introduces the element of time. The relative importance of the two effects should determine the form of the relation between distances and observed velocities.”

However, Lemaître’s successful explanation of Hubble’s discovery finally changed the viewpoint of the majority of workers in the field. At this point Einstein rejected the cosmological term as superfluous and no longer justified . He published his new view in the Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. The correct citation is:

Einstein. A. (1931). Sitzungsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. 235-37.

Many authors have quoted this paper but never read it. As a result, the quotations gradually changed in an interesting, quite systematic fashion. Some steps are shown in the following sequence:

1. A. Einstein. 1931. Sitzsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. …
2. A. Einstein. Sitzber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. … (1931)
3. A. Einstein (1931). Sber. preuss. Akad. Wiss. …
4. Einstein. A .. 1931. Sb. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. …
5. A. Einstein. S.-B. Preuss. Akad. Wis. …1931
6. A. Einstein. S.B. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. (1931) …
7. Einstein, A., and Preuss, S.B. (1931). Akad. Wiss. 235

Presumably, one day some historian of science will try to find out what happened with the young physicist S.B. Preuss, who apparently wrote just one important paper and then disappeared from the scene.

At the end of the paper Einstein adds some remarks about the age problem which was quite severe without the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term, since Hubble’s value of the Hubble parameter was almost ten times too large. Einstein is, however, not very worried and suggests two ways out. First he says that the matter distribution is in reality inhomogeneous and that the approximate treatment may be illusionary. Then he adds that in astronomy one should be cautious with large extrapolations in time.

Einstein repeated his new standpoint much later , and this was also adopted by many other influential workers, e.g., by Pauli . Whether Einstein really considered the introduction of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term as “the biggest blunder of his life” appears doubtful to me. In his published work and letters I never found such a strong statement. Einstein discarded the cosmological term just for simplicity reasons. For a minority of cosmologists (O.Heckmann, for example ), this was not sufficient reason. Paraphrasing Rabi, one might ask: ‘who ordered it away’?

After the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-force was rejected by its inventor, other cosmologists, like Eddington, retained it. One major reason was that it solved the problem of the age of the Universe when the Hubble time scale was thought to be only 2 billion years (corresponding to the value $`H_0500kms^1Mpc^1`$ of the Hubble constant). This was even shorter than the age of the Earth. In addition, Eddington and others overestimated the age of stars and stellar systems.

For this reason, the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term was employed again and a model was revived which Lemaître had singled out from the many solutions of the Friedmann-Lemaître equations333I recall that Friedmann included the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term in his basic equations. I find it remarkable that for the negatively curved solutions he pointed out that these may be open or compact (but not simply connected).. This so-called Lemaître hesitation universe is closed and has a repulsive $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-force ($`\mathrm{\Lambda }>0`$), which is slightly greater than the value chosen by Einstein. It begins with a big bang and has the following two stages of expansion. In the first the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-force is not important, the expansion is decelerated due to gravity and slowly approaches the radius of the Einstein universe. At about the same time, the repulsion becomes stronger than gravity and a second stage of expansion begins which eventually inflates into a whimper. In this way a positive $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ was employed to reconcile the expansion of the Universe with the age of stars.

The repulsive effect of a positive cosmological constant can be seen from the following consequence of Einstein’s field equations for the time-dependent scale factor $`a(t)`$:

$$\ddot{a}=\frac{4\pi G}{3}(\rho +3p)a+\frac{\mathrm{\Lambda }}{3}a,$$
(3)
where $`p`$ is the pressure of all forms of matter.

Historically, the Newtonian analog of the cosmological term was regarded by Einstein, Weyl, Pauli, and others as a Yukawa term. This is not correct, as I now show.

For a better understanding of the action of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term it may be helpful to consider a general static spacetime with the metric (in adapted coordinates)

$$ds^2=\phi ^2dt^2+g_{ik}dx^idx^k,$$
(4)
where $`\phi `$ and $`g_{ik}`$ depend only on the spatial coordinate $`x^i`$. The component $`R_{00}`$ of the Ricci tensor is given by $`R_{00}=\overline{\mathrm{\Delta }}\phi /\phi `$, where $`\overline{\mathrm{\Delta }}`$ is the three-dimensional Laplace operator for the spatial metric $`g_{ik}`$ in (4) (see,e.g., ). Let us write Eq. (1) in the form

$$G_{\mu \nu }=\kappa (T_{\mu \nu }+T_{\mu \nu }^\mathrm{\Lambda })(\kappa =8\pi G),$$
(5)
with

$$T_{\mu \nu }^\mathrm{\Lambda }=\frac{\mathrm{\Lambda }}{8\pi G}g_{\mu \nu }.$$
(6)
This has the form of the energy-momentum tensor of an ideal fluid, with energy density $`\rho _\mathrm{\Lambda }=\mathrm{\Lambda }/8\pi G`$ and pressure $`p_\mathrm{\Lambda }=\rho _\mathrm{\Lambda }`$. For an ideal fluid at rest Einstein’s field equation implies

$$\frac{1}{\phi }\overline{\mathrm{\Delta }}\phi =4\pi G\left[(\rho +3p)+\underset{2\rho _\mathrm{\Lambda }}{\underset{}{(\rho _\mathrm{\Lambda }+3p_\mathrm{\Lambda })}}\right].$$
(7)
Since the energy density and the pressure appear in the combination $`\rho +3p`$, we understand that a positive $`\rho _\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ leads to a repulsion (as in (3)). In the Newtonian limit we have $`\phi 1+\varphi (\varphi `$ : Newtonian potential) and $`p\rho `$, hence we obtain the modified Poisson equation

$$\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi =4\pi G(\rho 2\rho _\mathrm{\Lambda }).$$
(8)
This is the correct Newtonian limit.

As a result of revised values of the Hubble parameter and the development of the modern theory of stellar evolution in the 1950s, the controversy over ages was resolved and the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term became again unnecessary. (Some tension remained for values of the Hubble parameter at the higher end of recent determinations.)

However, in 1967 it was revived again in order to explain why quasars appeared to have redshifts that concentrated near the value $`z=2`$. The idea was that quasars were born in the hesitation era . Then quasars at greatly different distances can have almost the same redshift, because the universe was almost static during that period. Other arguments in favor of this interpretation were based on the following peculiarity. When the redshifts of emission lines in quasar spectra exceed 1.95, then redshifts of absorption lines in the same spectra were, as a rule, equal to 1.95. This was then quite understandable, because quasar light would most likely have crossed intervening galaxies during the epoch of suspended expansion, which would result in almost identical redshifts of the absorption lines. However, with more observational data evidence for the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term dispersed for the third time.

## 4 Quantum aspects of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-problem

Let me conclude this historical review with a few remarks on the quantum aspect of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-problem. Since quantum physicists had so many other problems, it is not astonishing that in the early years they did not worry about this subject. An exception was Pauli, who wondered in the early 1920s whether the zero-point energy of the radiation field could be gravitationally effective.

As background I recall that Planck had introduced the zero-point energy with somewhat strange arguments in 1911. The physical role of the zero-point energy was much discussed in the days of the old Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum theory. From Charly Enz and Armin Thellung – Pauli’s last two assistants – I have learned that Pauli had discussed this issue extensively with O.Stern in Hamburg. Stern had calculated, but never published, the vapor pressure difference between the isotopes 20 and 22 of Neon (using Debye theory). He came to the conclusion that without zero-point energy this difference would be large enough for easy separation of the isotopes, which is not the case in reality. These considerations penetrated into Pauli’s lectures on statistical mechanics  (which I attended). The theme was taken up in an article by Enz and Thellung . This was originally written as a birthday gift for Pauli, but because of Pauli’s early death, appeared in a memorial volume of Helv.Phys.Acta.

¿From Pauli’s discussions with Enz and Thellung we know that Pauli estimated the influence of the zero-point energy of the radiation field – cut off at the classical electron radius – on the radius of the universe, and came to the conclusion that it “could not even reach to the moon”.

When, as a student, I heard about this, I checked Pauli’s unpublished444A trace of this is in Pauli’s Handbuch article  on wave mechanics in the section where he discusses the meaning of the zero-point energy of the quantized radiation field. remark by doing the following little calculation:

In units with $`\mathrm{}=c=1`$ the vacuum energy density of the radiation field is

$$<\rho >_{vac}=\frac{8\pi }{(2\pi )^3}_0^{\omega _{max}}\frac{\omega }{2}\omega ^2𝑑\omega =\frac{1}{8\pi ^2}\omega _{max}^4,$$

with

$$\omega _{max}=\frac{2\pi }{\lambda _{max}}=\frac{2\pi m_e}{\alpha }.$$

The corresponding radius of the Einstein universe in Eq.(2) would then be ($`M_{pl}1/\sqrt{G}`$)

$$a=\frac{\alpha ^2}{(2\pi )^{\frac{2}{3}}}\frac{M_{pl}}{m_e}\frac{1}{m_e}31km.$$

This is indeed less than the distance to the moon. (It would be more consistent to use the curvature radius of the static de Sitter solution; the result is the same, up to the factor $`\sqrt{3/2}`$.)

For decades nobody else seems to have worried about contributions of quantum fluctuations to the cosmological constant, also physicists learned after Dirac’s hole theory that the vacuum state in quantum field theory is not an empty medium, but has interesting physical properties. As an important example I mention the papers by Heisenberg and Euler  in which they calculated the modifications of Maxwell’s equations due to the polarization of the vacuum. Shortly afterwards, Weisskopf  not only simplified their calculations but also gave a thorough discussion of the physics involved in charge renormalization. Weisskopf related the modification of Maxwell’s Lagrangian to the change of the energy of the Dirac sea as a function of slowly varying external electromagnetic fields. Avoiding the old fashioned Dirac sea, this effective Lagrangian is due to the interaction of a classical electromagnetic field with the vacuum fluctuations of the electron positron field. After a charge renormalization this change is finite and gives rise to electric and magnetic polarization vectors of the vacuum. In particular, the refraction index for light propagating perpendicular to a static homogeneous magnetic field depends on the polarization direction. This is the vacuum analog of the well-known Cotton-Mouton effect in optics. As a result, an initially linearly polarized light beam becomes elliptic. (In spite of great efforts it has not yet been possible to observe this effect.)

In the thirties, people like Weisskopf were, however, not interested in gravity. As far as I know, the first who came back to possible contributions of the vacuum energy density to the cosmological constant was Zel’dovich. He discussed this issue in two papers  during the third renaissance period of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term, but before the advent of spontaneously broken gauge theories. The following remark by him is particularly interesting. Even if one assumes completely ad hoc that the zero-point contributions to the vacuum energy density are exactly cancelled by a bare term, there still remain higher-order effects. In particular, gravitational interactions between the particles in the vacuum fluctuations are expected on dimensional grounds to lead to a gravitational self-energy density of order $`G\mu ^6`$, where $`\mu `$ is some cut-off scale. Even for $`\mu `$ as low as 1 GeV (for no good reason) this is about 9 orders of magnitude larger than the observational bound.

This illustrates that there is something profound that we do not understand at all, certainly not in quantum field theory ( so far also not in string theory). We are unable to calculate the vacuum energy density in quantum field theories, like the Standard Model of particle physics. But we can attempt to make what appear to be reasonable order-of-magnitude estimates for the various contributions. All expectations are in gigantic conflict with the facts. Trying to arrange the cosmological constant to be zero is unnatural in a technical sense. It is like enforcing a particle to be massless, by fine-tuning the parameters of the theory when there is no symmetry principle which implies a vanishing mass. The vacuum energy density is unprotected from large quantum corrections. This problem is particularly severe in field theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. In such models there are usually several possible vacuum states with different energy densities. Furthermore, the energy density is determined by what is called the effective potential, and this is dynamically determined. Nobody can see any reason why the vacuum of the Standard Model we ended up as the Universe cooled, has – for particle physics standards – an almost vanishing energy density. Most probably, we will only have a satisfactory answer once we shall have a theory which successfully combines the concepts and laws of general relativity about gravity and spacetime structure with those of quantum theory.

For more on this, see e.g.  (and references therein), as well as other contributions to this meeting.


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# Itinerant Ferromagnetism in the Periodic Anderson Model

## I Introduction

Itinerant ferromagnetism was the first collective quantum phenomena considered as a manifestation of the strong Coulomb interactions which are present in an electronic system. However, the origin of this phenomenon is still an open problem. Here we introduce a novel mechanism for itinerant ferromagnetism, which is based on a simple two-band model. This work is an extension of a previous letter  where we have described the basic ideas. In this paper, we show that the mechanism is supported by the numerical results obtained from quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations of the periodic Anderson model (PAM). We also analyse the experimental consequences for some $`f`$ electron compounds and the Iron group. However, before describing the details of our mechanism, it is useful to develop a historical perspective for the itinerant ferromagnetism.

Seventy four years ago, Heisenberg  formulated his spin model to address the problem of ferroamgnetism, but as Bloch  pointed out, a model of localized spins cannot explain the metallic ferromagnetism observed in iron, cobalt and nickel. By introducing the effects of exchange terms into the Sommerfeld description of the free-electron gas, Bloch predicted a ferromagnetic ground state for a sufficiently low electron density. In 1934, Wigner  added the correlation terms to the model considered by Bloch. After analyzing the effects of the correlations, he concluded that the conditions for ferromagnetism in the electron gas were so stringent as to be never satisfied.

The first attempt at analyzing a real FM metal, like Ni, was made by Slater . He concluded that the main contribution to the exchange energy is provided by intra-atomic interactions. In the meantime, Stoner  introduced his picture where the metallic ferromagnetism results from holes in the $`3d`$ band interacting via an exchange energy proportional to the relative magnetization and obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics. However, the model considered first by Stoner  and later by Wohlfarth , did not take into account the correlations of the $`3d`$ electrons, except for the constraints imposed by the Pauli exclusion principle. In other words, they did not consider the fact that the Coulomb repulsion tends to keep the electrons apart.

In 1953, the importance of these correlations was pointed out by van Vleck . He emphasized that the energy required to tear off an electron increases rapidly with the degree of ionization. (The energy of two Ni atoms in a $`3d^9`$ configuration is appreciably lower than having one atom in the $`3d^8`$ state and the other one in $`3d^{10}`$.) Based on this observation, he proposed an alternative picture (minimum polarity model) where the states of higher ionization in Ni are ruled out completely, and the configuration $`3d^{9.4}`$ is considered to be 40 percent $`3d^{10}`$ and sixty percent $`3d^9`$. The lattice sites occupied by $`3d^9`$ and $`3d^{10}`$ configurations are continuously redistributing in his picture. The van Vleck proposal is the precursor of the Hubbard model for infinite $`U`$.

Following Slater , van Vleck  speculated that the contamination by states of higher polarity, not included in his model, provides the exchange interaction (intra-atomic in this case) necessary for ferromagnetism. Hence he calculated the effective nearest-neighbor magnetic interaction induced by second order perturbative fluctuations from the $`d^9+d^9`$ configuration to the $`d^8+d^{10}`$. In this way, van Vleck arrived at a model which describes itinerant and correlated (only allowing $`d^9`$ and $`d^{10}`$ configurations) holes with a nearest-neighbor exchange interaction $`\alpha 𝐒_𝐢.𝐒_𝐣`$ (generalized Heisenberg model). However, as van Vleck explained at the end of his paper , the sign and the magnitude of $`\alpha `$ are very sensitive to the precise values of the energies of the different possible intermediate states (singlets or triplets) in the $`d^8`$ configuration.

In 1963, the one-band Hubbard model was proposed independently by Gutzwiller , Hubbard  and Kanamori  to explain the metallic ferromagnetism in the $`3d`$ transition metals. The Hubbard model incorporates the kinetic energy in a single nondegenerate band with an intra-atomic Coulomb repulsion $`U`$ to describe the electrons in the $`s`$ band of the transition metals. In contrast to the previous models, the Hubbard model does not include any explicit exchange interaction which favors a ferromagnetic phase. The implicit question raised by this proposal is: Can ferromagnetism emerge from the interplay between the kinetic energy and the Coulomb repulsion, or it is strictly neccesary to include an explicit exchange interaction provided by the intra-atomic Hund’s coupling? This simple question becomes even more relevant if we consider $`f`$-electron itinerant ferromagnets, like CeRh3B2 , whose only local magnetic coupling is antiferromagnetic.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Nagaoka’s  and Lieb’s  theorems, the subsequent theoretical approches were not controlled enough to determine whether the Hubbard model has a FM phase. The central issue is the precise evaluation of the energy for the paramagnetic (PM) phase. Because it does not properly incorporate the correlations, mean field theory overestimates this energy and predicts a large FM region . In contrast, numerical calculations have narrowed the extent of this phase to a small region around the Nagaoka point .

There are several controversies in the history of itinerant ferromagnetism. Most of them originate in the lack of reliable methodologies to solve strongly correlated Hamiltonians. In addition, the number of compounds exhibiting ferromagnetism has increased during the last several decades. There is a new list of $`Ce`$ and $`U`$ based compounds which are itinerant ferromagnets  with large Curie temperatures (of the order of 100K) and the only explicit magnetic interaction is antiferromagnetic (Kondo like). This observation stimulated us to reconsider the situation of the iron group and ask whether the ferromagnetism originates in the intra-atomic Hund’s interaction or is just a consequence of the strong Coulomb repulsion between electrons with a particular band structure. One possible and plausible alternative is that these two phenomena are cooperating to stabilize a ferromagnetic ground state. In any case, it is important to elucidate whether a realistic lattice model only containing repulsive terms (for instance, the Hubbard model) can sustain a ferromagnetic state, or it is necessary to invoke additional terms which are explicitly ferromagnetic. The Hubbard Hamiltonian is in the first category. However, the most accurate numerical calculations seem to indicate that this model does not sustain a ferromagnetic ground state.

Going beyond the simple one-band Hubbard model has been advocated, for instance, by Vollhardt et al . They note that the inclusion of additional Coulomb density-density interactions, correlated hoppings, and direct exchange interactions favors FM ordering in the single-band Hubbard model. In fact, a very simple analysis shows that increasing the density of states $`𝒟(E)`$ below the Fermi energy $`E_F`$ and placing $`E_F`$ close to the lower band edge increases the FM tendency. One can achieve this by including a next nearest neighbor hopping $`t^{}`$ or by placing the hoppings on frustrated (non-bipartite) lattices. The effectiveness of $`t^{}`$ was studied numerically by Hlubina et. al.  for the Hubbard model on a square lattice. They found a FM state when the van Hove singularity in $`𝒟(E)`$ occurred at $`E_F`$. However, this phase was not robust against very small changes in $`t^{}`$.

After seven decades of intense effort, the microscopic mechanisms driving the metallic FM phase are still unknown . We still do not know what is the minimal lattice model of itinerant ferromagnetism and, more importantly, the basic mechanism of ordering.

While the Hubbard model is so reluctant to have a FM state, there is an increasing amount of evidence indicating that the Periodic Anderson Model (PAM) has a FM phase in a large region of its quantum phase diagram . Since the $`d`$ orbitals of the transition metals are hybridized with the $`sp`$ bands, we can consider the inclusion of a second band as the next step in the search of itinerant ferromagnetism from pure Coulomb repulsions. Indeed a very simple extension of the PAM can be used to describe the physics of the iron group . In addition, there is large number of cerium and uranium compounds, like Ce(Rh1-xRux)3B2 ($`T_c=115K`$) , CeRh3B2 , and US, USe, and UTe  which are metallic ferromagnets and can be describred with the PAM.

Ferromagnetism is readily found in the PAM by mean-field approximations in any dimensions . Using a slave-boson mean-field theory (SBMFT) for the symmetric PAM, Möller and Wölfe  found a PM or antiferromagnetic (AF) phase at half filling depending on the value of the Coulomb repulsion $`U`$. By lowering the density of electrons from 1/2 filling, they also found a smooth crossover from AF to FM order via a spiral phase. Just before 1/4 filling, they got a first-order transition from FM to AF order. More recently, the SBMFT calculations of Doradziński and Spalek  found wide regions of ferromagnetism in the intermediate valence regime that surprisingly extended well below 1/4 filling.

A ferromagnetic phase is also obtained when the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) is applied to the PAM . Tahvildar-Zadeh et al. found a region of ferromagnetism and studied its temperature dependence. At very low temperatures, their ferromagnetic region extended over a wide range of electron fillings and in many cases embraced the electron filling of 3/8. They proposed a specific Kondo-induced mechanism for ferromagnetism at 3/8 filling that has the conduction electrons in a spin-polarized charge density-wave anti-aligned with the ferromagnetically aligned local moments on the valence orbitals. More recently Meyer and Nolting appended perturbation theory to DMFT and also predicted ferromagnetism over a broad range of electron filling extending below 1/4 filling. In addition Schwieger and Nolting  also considered an extension of the PAM, similar to the one considerd here, to estimate the importance of $`sd`$ hybridization for the magnetic properties of transition metals.

There is also a considerable amount of numerical evidence showing ferromagnetic solutions for the ground state of the PAM. Noack and Guerrero , for example, found partially and completely saturated ferromagnetism using the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method in one dimension. They considered a parameter regime where there is one electron in each $`f`$ orbital. For a sufficiently large value of $`U`$, the model exhibited a ferromagnetic ground state. Beyond an interaction-dependent value of the doping and a doping-dependent value of $`U`$, this state disappeared. The ferromagnetic phase was a peninsula in a phase diagram that was otherwise a sea of paramagnetism except at 1/4 and 1/2 filling where the ground state of the PAM was antiferromagnetic.

Our previous  and new QMC results qualitatively agree with the DMRG work; however, the phases we find quantitatively and qualitatively disagree with those derived from the mean-field approximations. Quantitatively, we find ferromagnetism in a narrower doping range than the one predicted by the DMFT and SBMFT calculations. For fillings between 3/8 and 1/2, QMC predicts a PM region, whereas mean-field theory predicts ferromagnetic states in part of that region. In fact, at a filling of 3/8 where DMFT calculations predict ferromagnetism, we find a novel ground state of an entirely different symmetry. Instead of ferromagnetism, QMC finds a resonating spin density-wave (RSDW) state; that is, the ground state was a linear combination of two degenerate spin-density waves characterized by the $`(\pi ,0)`$ and $`(0,\pi )`$ wave vectors.

The novel mechanism we introduce in the present paper operates when the system is in a mixed valence regime. This regime has been studied numerically only in the context of DMFT . We will show however that the ferromagnetic solution obtained with DMFT in the mixed valence regime has a different origin and therefore is not representative of our new mechanism. The main ingredients for our mechanism are an uncorrelated dispersive band which is hybridized with a correlated and narrow band. We show the PAM supports our mechanism by doing quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations on one and two dimensional lattices. The results of these simulations are interpreted with an effective Hamiltonian derived from the PAM. In this way, we establish that the new mechanism can be interpreted as a generalization to the lattice of the first Hund’s rule for the atom. The two level band structure generated by the gap recreates for the lattice, the shell-like level strucure of the hydrogenic atom. When the lower shell is incomplete, the local part of the Coulomb interaction is minimized by polarizing the electrons which are occupying the incomplete shell.

## II Model

The PAM was originally introduced to explain the properties of the the rare-earth and actinide metallic compounds including the so called heavy fermion compounds. A very simple extension of this model can also be applied to the description of many transition metals . The basic ingredients of this model are a narrow and correlated $`f`$ band hybridized with a despersive and uncorrelated $`d`$ band. The Hamiltonian associated with this model is:

$`H=H_0+H_U`$ (1)
$`H_0=`$ $`t_a`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,𝐫^{},\sigma }{}}(a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫^{}\sigma }+a_{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫\sigma })+ϵ_a{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,\sigma }{}}n_{𝐫\sigma }^a`$ (2)
$``$ $`t_b`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,𝐫^{},\sigma }{}}(b_{𝐫\sigma }^{}b_{𝐫^{}\sigma }+b_{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{}b_{𝐫\sigma })`$ (3)
$`+`$ $`V`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,\sigma }{}}(b_{𝐫\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫\sigma }+a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}b_{𝐫\sigma }),`$ (4)
$`H_U={\displaystyle \frac{U}{2}}{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,\sigma }{}}n_{𝐫\sigma }^an_{𝐫\overline{\sigma }}^a,`$ (5)
where $`b_{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ and $`a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ create an electron with spin $`\sigma `$ in $`b`$ and $`a`$ orbitals at lattice site $`𝐫`$ and $`n_{𝐫\sigma }^a=a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫\sigma }`$. The $`t_b`$ and $`t_a`$ hoppings are only to nearest-neighbor sites. When $`t_a=0`$, the Hamiltonian is the standard PAM. For the $`f`$ electron compounds, the $`a`$ and $`b`$ orbitals play the role of the $`f`$ and $`d`$ orbitals, and $`t_a0`$. For transition metals, they correspond to the $`3d`$ and $`4s`$ orbitals. Unless otherwise specified, we will set $`t_b=1`$.

For $`U=0`$, the resulting Hamiltonian $`H_0`$ is easily diagonalized:

$`H_0={\displaystyle \underset{𝐤,\sigma }{}}\left(E_𝐤^+\beta _{𝐤\sigma }^{}\beta _{𝐤\sigma }^{}+E_𝐤^{}\alpha _{𝐤\sigma }^{}\alpha _{𝐤\sigma }^{}\right)`$ (6)
where the dispersion relations for the upper and the lower bands are:

$`E_𝐤^\pm ={\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\left[e_𝐤^b+e_𝐤^a\pm \sqrt{(e_𝐤^be_𝐤^a)^2+4V^2}\right],`$ (7)
with

$`e_𝐤^b`$ $`=`$ $`2t_b{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{D}{}}}\mathrm{cos}k_{x_i},`$ (8)
$`e_𝐤^a`$ $`=`$ $`ϵ_a2t_a{\displaystyle \underset{i=1}{\overset{D}{}}}\mathrm{cos}k_{x_i},`$ (9)
for a hypercubic lattice in dimension $`D`$. The operators which create quasi-particles in the lower and upper bands are:

$`\alpha _{𝐤\sigma }^{}`$ $`=`$ $`u_𝐤a_{𝐤\sigma }^{}+v_𝐤b_{𝐤\sigma }^{},`$ (10)
$`\beta _{𝐤\sigma }^{}`$ $`=`$ $`v_𝐤a_{𝐤\sigma }^{}+u_𝐤b_{𝐤\sigma }^{},`$ (11)
with

$`u_𝐤`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{E_𝐤^+e_𝐤^a}{\sqrt{(E_𝐤^+e_𝐤^a)^2+V^2}}},`$ (12)
$`v_𝐤`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{V}{\sqrt{(E_𝐤^+e_𝐤^a)^2+V^2}}}.`$ (13)
The noninteracting bands $`E_𝐤^\pm `$ are plotted in Fig. 1 for a one dimensional system. If $`|V||t_b|`$, we can identify regions with well defined $`f`$ or $`d`$ character in the lower and the upper bands. In particular, the case illustrated in Fig. 1 corresponds to a situation where the $`a`$ and the $`b`$ bands were crossing before being hybridized ($`ϵ_a>2t_b`$). We see a small region in the center of the lower band which is dispersive and large regions on both sides which are nearly flat. The upper band exhibits the opposite behavior. The nearly flat regions in each band correspond to states with a predominant $`f`$ character, while the dispersive regions are associated to the states with $`d`$ character.

## III New Mechanism for Ferromagnetism

The PAM has different regimes depending on the values of its parameters and the particle concentration $`n=N_e/4N`$ ($`N_e`$ is the total number of particles and $`N`$ is the number of unit cells). If $`V|ϵ_a|`$ and $`V|U+ϵ_a|`$, there is one particle (magnetic moment) localized in each $`a`$ orbital, and the fluctuations to the conduction band can be considered in a perturbative way. By this procedure, the PAM can be reduced to the Kondo Lattice Model (KLM)  which contains only one parameter $`J_K/t`$ (with $`J_K=`$ and $`t=t_b`$). The KLM has been extensively studied , and the evolution of its phase diagram is described for instance in a review article by Tsunetsugu et al . One of the earliest approaches to the KLM is the mean field treatment of Doniach  for the related one dimensional Kondo necklace. For half filling, this approximation leads to a transition from a Néel ordered state in the weak coupling regime ($`J_K|t|`$) to a nonmagnetic ‘Kondo singlet’ state above the critical value $`J_K^c=t`$.

Lacroix and Cyrot  did a more extensive mean field treatment for three dimensional KLM. They also found a magnetically ordered state for weak coupling. For low density of conduction electrons. In their phase diagram, the ordered state is ferromagnetic for low and intermediate densities of conduction electrons, and antiferromagnetic in the vicinity of half filling. The ‘Kondo singlet’ phase appears above some critical value of $`J_K^c(n)`$ in the whole range of concentrations.

Using another mean field treatment for the one dimensional KLM, Fazekas and Müller-Hartmann  obtained a phase diagram containing only magnetically ordered phases: spiral below some critical value of $`J_K/t`$ which depends on the particle density and ferromagnetic above this value. To get this result, they fixed the orientation of the localized spins in a spiral ordering and minimized the total energy with respect to the wave vector of the spiral. Even though this treatment of the spin polarized state is valid for classical spins, it neglects completely the Kondo singlet formation which occurs in the strong coupling limit for the considered case ($`S=1/2`$).

Sigrist et al  gave an exact treatment of one dimensional KLM for the strong coupling regime $`J_Kt`$ finding a ferromagnetic phase for any particle density. However, it is important to remark that the mechanism driving the ferromagnetism in the later case is not the same as the double-exchange mechanism associated with the mean field solution of Fazekas and Müller-Hartmann . To understand this difference, we just need to notice that for $`J_K/t=\mathrm{}`$ mean field  predicts a ferromagnetic solution while the exact solution has a complete spin degeneracy. Therefore double-exchange is not the mechanism driving the ferromagnetic phase of the KLM (at least when the localized spins are $`S=1/2`$).

The real mechanism has been unveiled by Sigrist et al  who used degenerate perturbation theory to determine the lifting of this degeneracy when the ratio $`J_K/t`$ becomes finite. The new ground state is an itinerant ferromagnet for any concentration of conduction electrons. In this state, the spins which are not participating in Kondo singlet are fully polarized. We can see from their solution that the motion of the Kondo singlets stabilizes the FM state in a way similar to Nagaoka’s solution . The second order effective Hamiltonian obtained after the perturbative calculation includes nearest-neighbor hopping $`t/2`$, plus a next-nearest-neighbor correlated hopping $`t^{}`$ which is order $`t^2/J_K`$. Then there are two different ways to move a Kondo singlet from one site to its next-nearest-neighbor: by two applications of $`t/2`$ or by one application of $`t^{}`$. Only when the background is ferromagnetic do both processes lead to the same final state. If $`t^{}`$ has the appropriate sign (which is the case for the KLM ) the resulting interference is “constructive” and the FM state has the lowest energy. We can see in this example that the motion of the Kondo singlet can stabilize a magnetic phase.

There are different regimes for which the PAM cannot be reduced to a KLM by a perturbative approach. One of these situations corresponds to the intermediate valence region: $`ϵ_aE_F`$. In this case $`n_i^a`$ is not longer close to one and the $`a`$ electrons can move.

In Fig. 1, we illustrate the (one-dimensional) non-interacting bands for the case of interest: $`ϵ_a`$ close to $`E_F`$ and above the bottom of the $`b`$ band. If $`|V||t_b|`$, we can identify two subspaces in each band where the states have either $`b`$ ($`\psi `$ subspace) or $`a`$ ($`\varphi `$ subspace) character. The size of the crossover region around the points where the original unhybridized $`b`$ and $`a`$ bands crossed is proportional to $`|V/t_b|`$; that is, it is very small. The creation operators for the Wannier orbitals $`\psi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ and $`\varphi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ associated with each subspace are:

$`\psi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^>}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}\beta _{𝐤\sigma }^{}+{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^<}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}\alpha _{𝐤\sigma }^{}\right]`$ (14)
$`\varphi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^>}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}\alpha _{𝐤\sigma }^{}+{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^<}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}\beta _{𝐤\sigma }^{}\right].`$ (15)
where $`N`$ is the number of sites. The subsets $`𝐊^>`$ and $`𝐊^<`$ are defined by: $`𝐊^>=\{𝐤:|u_𝐤||v_𝐤|\}`$ and $`𝐊^<=\{𝐤:|v_𝐤|>|u_𝐤\}`$. Since the $`\psi `$ and the $`\varphi `$ subspaces are generated by eigenstates of $`H_0`$, it is clear that both subspaces can only be mixed by the interacting term $`H_U`$. Therefore in the new basis we have:

$`H_0=H_0^\varphi +H_0^\psi ={\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,𝐫^{},\sigma }{}}\tau _{𝐫𝐫^{}}^\varphi \varphi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}\varphi _{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{}+{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,𝐫^{},\sigma }{}}\tau _{𝐫𝐫^{}}^\psi \psi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}\psi _{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{},`$ (16)
with the hoppings $`\tau _𝐫^\varphi `$ and $`\tau _𝐫^\psi `$ given by the following expressions:

$`\tau _𝐫^\varphi ={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}[{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^>}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}E_𝐤^{}+{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^<}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}E_𝐤^+]`$ (17)
$`\tau _𝐫^\psi ={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}[{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^>}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}E_𝐤^++{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^<}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}E_𝐤^{}].`$ (18)
The segmented structure of the $`\psi `$ and the $`\varphi `$ bands introduce oscillations in the hoppings $`\tau _𝐫^\psi `$ and $`\tau _𝐫^\varphi `$ as a function of the distance $`|𝐫|`$.

Because the $`U`$ term in $`H`$ involves only the $`a`$ orbitals, the matrix elements of $`H`$ connecting the $`\varphi `$ and $`\psi `$ subspaces are small compared to the characteristic energy scales of the problem (the matrix elements of $`H`$ within the subspaces). To see this we express $`a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ as a function of $`\varphi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ and $`\psi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ by first inverting Eqs. 13 and 15 to find:

$$a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}=\underset{𝐫^{}}{}W_{𝐫𝐫^{}}\varphi _{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{}+w_{𝐫𝐫^{}}\psi _{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{},$$
(19)
where the weights $`W_𝐫`$ and $`w_𝐫`$ are defined by:

$`W_𝐫={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^>}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}u_𝐤+{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^<}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}v_𝐤\right]`$ (20)
$`w_𝐫={\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^>}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}v_𝐤+{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤𝐊^<}{}}e^{i𝐤𝐫}u_𝐤\right].`$ (21)
The value of these weights as a function of the distance $`𝐫`$ is plotted in Fig. 2 (for $`ϵ_a=1.5`$, $`V=0.1t`$ and $`t_a=0`$). From Fig. 2 we can see that $`W_\mathrm{𝟎}`$ is much larger than any other weight. This is so because the $`\varphi `$ orbitals have predominantly $`a`$ character, while the $`\psi `$ orbitals have mostly $`b`$ character in the considered region of parameters. Therefore we can approximate the creation operator $`a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ by:

$$a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}\underset{𝐫^{}}{}W_{𝐫𝐫^{}}\varphi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}$$
(22)
As a consequence of this approximation, the $`a`$ subspace becomes invariant under the application of $`H`$. In addition, because $`|W_\mathrm{𝟎}^{}||W_{𝐫\mathrm{𝟎}}^{}|`$ (see Fig. 2), we can establish a hierarchy of terms where the lowest order one corresponds to a simple on-site repulsion:

$$H_{eff}^U=\stackrel{~}{U}\underset{𝐫}{}n_𝐫^\varphi n_𝐫^\varphi $$
(23)
with $`\stackrel{~}{U}=U|W_\mathrm{𝟎}|^4`$ and $`n_{𝐫\sigma }^\varphi =\varphi _{𝐫,\sigma }^{}\varphi _{𝐫,\sigma }^{}`$. The next order terms, containing three and two $`W_\mathrm{𝟎}`$ factors, are much smaller and are essentially the same as the intersite interactions which in the past were added to the Hubbard model to enhance the ferromagnetism .

Adding $`H_{eff}^U`$ to $`H_0`$ we get the effective Hamiltonian:

$`H_{eff}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,𝐫^{},\sigma }{}}(\tau _{𝐫𝐫^{}}^\psi \psi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}\psi _{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{}+\tau _{𝐫𝐫^{}}^\varphi \varphi _{𝐫\sigma }^{}\varphi _{𝐫^{}\sigma }^{})`$ (24)
$`+`$ $`\stackrel{~}{U}{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫}{}}n_𝐫^\varphi n_𝐫^\varphi `$ (25)
The $`\psi `$ and $`\varphi `$ orbitals form uncorrelated and correlated non-hybridized bands: $`H_{eff}=H^\psi +H^\varphi `$. For the $`\varphi `$ orbitals we obtain an effective one band Hubbard model with the peculiar double shell like dispersion relation shown by the thick lines in Fig. 1.

Particularly for $`t_a=0`$, $`H^\varphi `$ has a very large density of states in the lower shell of the $`\varphi `$ band  which is located near $`ϵ_a`$ . From Fig. 1 it is also clear that the electrons first doubly occupy the uncorrelated $`\psi `$ band states which are below $`ϵ_a`$. However, when $`E_F`$ gets close to $`ϵ_a`$, i.e., the system is in the mixed valence regime, the electrons close to the Fermi level go into some of the correlated $`\varphi `$ states. Then, the interaction term $`H_{eff}^U`$, combined with the double shell band structure of $`H_0^\varphi `$, gives rise to a FM ground state (GS): The electrons close to $`E_F`$ spread to higher unoccupied $`𝐤`$ states and polarize, which causes the spatial part of their wave function to become antisymmetric, eliminating double occupancy in real space and reducing the Coulomb repulsion to zero. The cost of polarizing is just an increase in the kinetic energy proportional to $`\delta _a\mathrm{}v_F\delta _k`$, where $`v_F`$ is the Fermi velocity and $`\delta _k`$ is the interval in $`𝐤`$ space in which the electrons are polarized.

To determine the stability of this unsaturated FM state, we compare its energy with that of the PM state. If we were to build a nonmagnetic state with only the states of the lower $`\varphi `$ shell, we would find a restricted delocalization for each electron because of the exclusion of the finite set of band states ($`𝐤`$-states) in the upper shell. To avoid the Coulomb repulsion $`U`$ for double occupying a given site, the electrons need to occupy all $`𝐤`$-states. This means they have to occupy the $`\varphi `$ states in the upper and lower shells. This restricted delocalization is a direct consequence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the resulting localization length depends on the wave vectors, where the original $`b`$ and $`a`$ bands crossed, that define the size ($`\mathrm{\Delta }𝐤`$) of each shell. The energy cost for occupying the $`\varphi `$ states in the upper shell is proportional to the hybridization gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$. Therefore if $`U`$ is the dominant energy scale in the problem and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\delta _a`$, the FM state lies lower in energy than the nonmagnetic state. Under these conditions, the effective FM interaction is proportional to the hybridization gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$.

This mechanism for ferromagnetism on a lattice is analogous to the intra-atomic Hund’s mechanism polarizing electrons in atoms. In atoms, we also have different degenerate (the equivalent of $`\delta _a`$ is zero) shells separated by an energy gap. If the valence shell is open, the electrons polarize to avoid the short range part of the Coulomb repulsion (again reflecting the Pauli exclusion principle). The energy of an eventual nonmagnetic state is proportional either to the magnitude of the Coulomb repulsion or to the energy gap between different shells. The interplay between both energies sets the scale of Hund’s intra-atomic exchange coupling.

## IV Numerical Method

Our numerical method, the constrained-path Monte Carlo (CPMC) method, is extensively described and benchmarked elsewhere. Here we only discuss its basic features, assumptions and special details about our use of it.

In the CPMC method, the ground-state wave function $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$ is projected from a known initial wave function $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$ by a branching random walk in an over-complete space of Slater determinants $`|\varphi `$. In such a space, we can write $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_0=_\varphi c_\varphi |\varphi `$, where $`c_\varphi >0`$. The random walk produces an ensemble of $`|\varphi `$, called random walkers, which represent $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$ in the sense that their distribution is a Monte Carlo sampling of $`c_\varphi /_\varphi c_\varphi `$, that is, a sampling of the ground-state wave function.

To completely specify $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$, only determinants satisfying $`\mathrm{\Psi }_0|\varphi >0`$ are needed because $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$ resides in either of two degenerate halves of the Slater determinant space, separated by a nodal plane. In the CPMC method the fermion sign problem occurs because walkers can cross this plane as their orbitals evolve continuously in the random walk. Without a priori knowledge of this plane, we use a trial wave function $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$ and require $`\mathrm{\Psi }_T|\varphi >0`$. The random walk solves Schrödinger’s equation in determinant space, but under an approximate boundary-condition. This is what is called the constrained-path approximation.

The quality of the calculation depends on the quality of the trial wave function $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$. Fortunately, extensive testing has demonstrated a significant insensitivity of the results to reasonable choices: Since the constraint only involves the overall sign of its overlap with any determinant $`|\varphi `$, some insensitivity of the results to $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$ is expected .

Besides as starting point and as a condition constraining a random walker, we also use $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$ as an importance function. Specifically, we use $`\mathrm{\Psi }_T|\varphi `$ to bias the random walk into those parts of Slater determinant space that have a large overlap with the trial state. For all three uses of $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$, it clearly is advantageous to have $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T`$ approximate $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$ as closely as possible. Only in the constraining of the path does $`|\mathrm{\Psi }_T|\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$ in general generate an approximation.

We constructed $`|\psi _T=_\sigma |\varphi _T^\sigma `$ from the eigenstates of the non-interacting problem. Because the total and z-component spin angular momentum, $`S`$ and $`S_z`$, are good quantum numbers, we could choose unequal numbers of up and down electrons to produce trial states and hence ground states with $`S=S_z=\frac{1}{2}(N_{}N_{})`$. Whenever possible, we would simulate closed shells of up and down electrons, as such cases usually provided energy estimates with the least statistical error, but because we wanted to study the ground state energy as a function of $`S`$, we frequently had to settle for just the up or down shell being closed. In some cases, the desired value of $`S`$ could not be generated from either shell being closed. Also we would select the non-interacting states so $`|\psi _T`$ would be translationally invariant, even if these states used did not all come from the Fermi sea. The use of unrestricted Hartree-Fock eigenstates to generate$`|\varphi _T^\sigma `$ instead of the non-interacting eigenstates generally produced no significant improvement in the results.

In particular, we represented the trial wavefunction as a single Slater determinant whose columns are the $`N_\sigma `$ single-particle orbitals obtained from the exact solution of $`H_0`$. We chose the orbitals with lowest energies given by $`E_𝐤^{}`$ and filled them up to a desired number of electrons $`N_e`$.

$$|\psi _T=\underset{𝐤,\sigma }{}\alpha _{𝐤,\sigma }^{}|0,$$
(26)
where $`|0`$ represents a vacuum for electrons. Since our calculations were performed for a less than full lower band, only states from the lower band were used to construct the trial wavefunction.

In a typical run we set the average number of random walkers to 400. We performed 2000 Monte Carlo sweeps before we taking measurements, and we made the measurements in 40 blocks of 400 steps. By choosing $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau =0.05`$, we reduced the systematic error associated with the Trotter approximation to be smaller than the statistical error. In measuring correlation functions, we performed between 20 to 40 back-propagation steps.

## V Quantum Monte Carlo Results

In section III, we have described a new mechanism for itinerant ferromagnetism which is present in the mixed valence regime for $`n>1/4`$. In addition, we mentioned that the system is also expected to be FM when the $`f`$ magnetic moments are localized ($`|V||E_Fϵ_a|`$) because the effective RKKY coupling is negative when the Fermi surface is small ($`k_F0`$). In this section we show that the itinerant and the localized ferromagnetic states are continuously connected in the phase diagram of the PAM. However, the energy scale of the first state is much larger than the RKKY interaction which characterizes the second one. The existence of a crossover region between both states could explain the fact that there are some $`f`$-electron compounds for which it is very difficult to determine whether they are itinerant or localized ferromagnets.

In addition, we will see that the QMC results are consistent with the simple picture derived from our effective model (Eq. ). According to that picture, the ferromagnetic state in the mixed valence regime should be similar to a partially polarized non-interacting solution where the polarized electrons are the ones occupying the $`f`$-character orbitals. It is only in the crossover region of size $`V^2/t_b`$ (see Fig. 1), where the orbitals have a mixed character, that the correlations introduce an appreciable effect. This effect is the well known Kondo-like singlet correlation between the $`d`$ and the $`f`$ electrons. However, it is important to remark that these Kondo singlets only exist in an energy interval $`V^2/W`$ (where $`W`$ is the $`d`$ bandwidth), and therefore the number of Kondo singlets $`N_{KS}`$ is much smaller than the number of magnetic moments $`N_{MM}`$: $`N_{KS}/N_{MM}V^2/W^2`$. This is a simple manifestation of the “exhaustion” phenomenon described by Nozierés . Since most of the $`f`$ magnetic moments are ferromagnetically polarized, the role of these few Kondo singlets is marginal in our FM solution. Therefore, for the mixed valence regime with $`n>1/4`$, the $`f`$ magnetic moments which are not screened by $`d`$ electrons develop an effective magnetic interaction as a consequence of the interplay between the local Coulomb interaction and the particular band structure. In other words, the “collective Kondo state” which was proposed in the past  is replaced by band ferromagnetism .

In fact, the nature of local moment compensation in the PAM differs qualitatively from that in the single impurity Anderson model . In the PAM, if the ground state is a singlet, then

$$S_f^z(j)^2=\underset{i}{}S_d^z(i)S_f^z(j)\underset{i}{}S_f^z(i)S_f^z(j)$$
(27)
In the impurity model, the last term is absent, and the resulting expression is the analytic statement of the well-known Clogston-Anderson compensation theorem that express the compensation of the f-moment by the conduction electrons. In the PAM, on the other hand, the last term dominates the first so the f-moment is compensated largely by correlations induced among themselves.

To understand the nature of the FM solution, we plotted the mean occupation number of the quasiparticle operators which diagonalize the non-interacting problem (see Eq. 11). This is shown in Fig. 3 for the lowest energy PM ($`S=0`$) state in a two dimensional cluster of $`12\times 12`$ unit cells. There we can see that the $`d`$-character states of the lower band are close to be doubly occupied. In contrast, the $`f`$-character region has a smaller occupation number ($`0.7`$). It is remarkable that the populations of the $`f`$-character states in the lower and the upper bands are very similar. This delocalization in the momentum space is a direct consequence of the tendency to avoid double-occupancy in the real space. This tendency indicates that the energy increase of the PM state due to the inclusion of $`U`$ is proportional to the hybridization gap.

Fig. 4 shows the quasiparticle occupation numbers for the partially saturated FM ground state. While the $`b`$-character states of the lower band are still close to being doubly occupied, the $`a`$-character ones are polarized and the occupation number is one for any of them. In contrast to the PM solution (see Fig.3), the occupation number for the $`f`$-character states in the upper band is much smaller. This difference can be understood in the following way: the polarized $`f`$-electrons can localize in momentum space because the Pauli exclusion principle prevents double occupancy in real space (the spatial wave function is completely antisymmetric). Therefore the $`a`$-electrons do not need to occupy the upper band states and the energy increase due to the repulsive $`U`$ term is proportional to $`\mathrm{}v_F\delta _k`$. The non-zero amount of electrons occupying the center of the upper band (see Fig. 4) is related to the crossover region for which the $`a`$ and the $`b`$ character of the states are comparable. Since the electrons occupying these states are not polarized, the effect of the Coulomb repulsion $`U`$ is the transfer of spectral weight from the lower to the upper band to avoid double occupancy in real space.

We can see from Figs. 5 and 6 that a similar behavior is obtained for one dimensional systems. As we explained in section III, the mechanism for this ferromagnetism works in any finite dimension. Notice in Fig. 5 that there is a jump in the occupation number of the lower band as a function of $`𝐤`$. The inverse of this jump is proportional to effective mass of the quasiparticles of the pramagnetic solution. When $`ϵ_a`$ decreases, the system evolves into a state where the $`a`$ electrons are localized. This evolution is reflected in the decrease of the jump and the consequent increase of the effective mass.

For $`U=0`$ the system is a PM metal. Therefore there must be a critical value of the on site repulsion $`U_c`$ which separates the PM from the FM region. The value obtained for $`U_c`$ is: $`U_c0.25\mathrm{\Delta }=0.242`$ for $`V=0.5`$ and $`U_c0.11\mathrm{\Delta }=0.0981`$ for $`V=0.31`$ (see Fig. 7). This is also in agreement with the mechanism described in section III. If $`\mathrm{\Delta }\delta `$ and $`U`$ becomes larger than the hybridization gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$, the system evolves into a FM state to avoid the double occupancy without an increase in the kinetic energy proportional to the hybridization gap.

According to Figs. 7b and 8 the magnetization seems to increase gradually when $`U`$ is increased beyond its critical value. This behavior suggests that the FM transition as function of $`U`$ is of second order. If this is so, the properties of the PM Fermi liquid which is obtained for $`U<U_c`$ should be strongly affected by the FM fluctuations when $`U`$ approaches $`U_c`$. It is known that the effective mass of the quasi-particles diverges in the approach to a zero temperature ferromagnetic instability . In other words, the behavior of the PM Fermi liquid cannot be understood by analogy with the one impurity problem. The Kondo temperature, which is the characteristic energy scale of the one impurity problem, is replaced by a new Fermi temperature which is dominated by the ferromagnetic fluctuations and goes to zero when $`U`$ approaches to $`U_c`$ from below.

Another relevant parameter for the FM solution is the hybridization $`V`$. For $`V=0`$ and $`ϵ_a=E_F`$ there is a complete spin degeneracy for the electrons occupying the localized $`a`$ orbitals. By increasing $`V`$, we are simultaneously changing the Fermi velocity $`v_F`$ and the hybridization gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$. For small values of $`V`$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ is much larger than $`\delta =\mathrm{}v_F\delta _k`$ in the region under consideration. For this reason, a non-zero value of $`V`$ removes the original spin degeneracy stabilizing the partially polarized FM solution (see Fig. 9). When $`V`$ is larger than $`t`$, the two relevant energy scales, $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ and $`\delta `$, become of the same order and the partially polarized FM is replaced by a PM phase. In the unrealistic large $`V`$ limit ($`|V||t_b|,U,|ϵ_a|`$), the ground state consists of local Kondo singlets moving in a background of localized spins .

Finally, the most sensitive parameter for the stabilization of the FM state is the difference $`|ϵ_aE_F|`$. In Fig. 10, we show the energy difference $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$ between the FM ground state and the lowest energy PM ($`S=0`$) state as a function of $`ϵ_a`$. When $`ϵ_a`$ is considerably smaller than $`E_F`$, the $`a`$ electrons are localized and the magnetism is dominated by the RKKY interaction. The order of this interaction is $`V^4`$. This gives the small value of $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$ when the $`a`$ levels are below the bottom of the conduction band $`ϵ_a<2D|t_b|`$. The most stable region for the FM state (maximum value of $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$) starts when $`ϵ_a`$ reaches the Fermi level. For the case of Fig. 10, this occurs at $`ϵ_a1.9t`$. Again this result is in agreement with the mechanism described in section III. If we continue increasing the value of $`ϵ_a`$, the number of $`a`$ electrons decreases and the magnetization is consequently reduced (see Fig. 10b). Finally, when $`ϵ_a`$ is no longer close to the bottom of the conduction band, $`\delta _a`$ becomes comparable to $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ and the ferromagnetism disappears.

Fig. 11 shows the $`ϵ_a`$ dependence of $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$ for two and three dimensional clusters. As in the one dimensional case, the stablity of the FM phase increases when the system appraches the mixed valence regime. If $`ϵ_a`$ is further increased, the magnetization goes to zero in a smooth way indicating that the associated quantum phase transition is of second order.

In Figs. 12 and 13 we show the scaling of $`\mathrm{\Delta }E`$ and the magnetization per site in one and two dimensional systems. The $`1/N`$ extrapolation for the one dimensional systems indicates that the FM ground state is stable in the thermodynamic limit. The extrapolated value for the magnetization is $`0.3`$, i.e., only a fraction of the $`f`$ electrons is polarized. The size effects are stronger in two dimensional systems. In Fig. 13, we show two different cases: the circles correspond to a sequence of tilted suqare clusters which allows us to fix the concentration in $`n=0.3`$; the squares correspond to a sequence of untilted square clusters for which the value of the concentration is the closest to $`n=0.29`$. Despite the considerable size effects, these results indicate that the FM state is stable in the thermodynamic limit. In this case, the extrapolated magnetization is close to 0.4.

Meyer and Nolting  have also found a FM solution for the PAM in a similar region of parameters using DMFT. However it is important to remark that the mechanism for ferromagnetism described in section III only works in finite dimension because the volume of the upper shell relative to the volume of the lower one goes to zero when the dimension goes to infinity. Therefore, the reason why a FM state is obtained with DMFT should be different. This is also reflected by the fact that the energy scale ($`T_c`$) of the FM solution found with DMFT for the localized regime is larger than the one for the mixed valence regime (region IV of Ref. ). This behavior is opposite to our result (see Fig. 10).

## VI Experimental Consequences

### A Cerium Compounds

During the last few years new experimental results have confirmed that there are Ce based compounds which cannot be treated as typical Kondo systems. For instance, CeRh3B2 has a very high FM ordering temperature ($`T_c=115^{}K`$) which sicks out from a localized $`4f`$-electron description . In addition the alloy series Ce(Rh1-xRux)3B2  and LaxCe1-xRh3B2  exhibit many unusual characteristics which require a new macroscopic description with respect to the competition among classical Kondo versus RKKY interactions .

Absorption edge spectroscopy measurements of Ce(Rh1-xRux)3B2 for different values of $`x`$ indicate that the stoichiometric compound CeRh3B2 is in the mixed valence regime (fluctuating between the $`4f^1`$ and the $`4f^0`$ configurations) . After doping with Ru, there is strong transfer of weight from the $`4f^1`$ line to the $`4f^0`$ structure. This change can be understood in the context of the PAM if we take into account that the volume of the system decreases when Ce is replaced by Rh . In this situation the width of the conduction band increases and some $`f`$ electrons are transferred to $`d`$ character orbitals (see Fig.1). According to our results this change must decrease the value of the zero temperature magnetization and the Curie temperature $`T_c`$. By increasing the doping level we can reach a situation where most of the $`f`$ electrons that were polarized in the stoichiometric compound are transferred to the $`d`$ character orbitals and the zero temperature magnetization is very small. In this limit the system should have some PM states very close to the Fermi level (see Fig. 1). When the energy difference between the Fermi level and these PM states becomes smaller than $`T_c`$, the magnetization can increase with temperature because the electrons which are occupying the PM states near the Fermi level are thermally promoted to the $`f`$ character states which are above the Fermi level. In this process, the electrons are polarized because of the mechanism discussed above. This explains the finite temperature peak in the magnetization of Ce(Rh1-xRux)3B2 (for $`x`$ between 0.06 and 0.125)  that suggests an ordered state with high entropy. The source of the large entropy is thus associated with charge and not with spin degrees of freedom which is why a state with larger $`M`$ has a higher entropy. From this analysis we predict that the integral of the entropy below $`T_c`$, which can be extracted from the specific heat measurements, contains a considerable contribution from the the charge degrees of freedom.

When Ce is replaced by La, the volume of the system increases  and the magnetic moments become more localized. In this case, the weight in the absorption edge spectroscopy is transferred from the $`4f^0`$ structure to the $`4f^1`$ line. Again this can be understood if we take into account that the width of the conduction band decreases in this case and the electrons are transferred from the $`d`$ to the $`f`$ character orbitals (see 1). In this way the system evolves from the itinerant to the localized situation ($`ϵ_f=ϵ_a<E_F`$). According to our results (see Fig.10), this change should increase the value of the zero temperature magnetization and simultaneously decrease the Curie temperature $`T_c`$ ($`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$ is strongly reduced because the effective magnetic interaction in the localized limit, $`J_{RKKY}`$, is order $`V^4`$ ). This anomalous behavior has been experimentally observed by Shaheen et al  in LaxCe1-xRh3B2.

We can also connect our mechanism with the hydrostatic pressure dependence of $`T_c`$. To do this we calculated $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|/N`$ by the QMC method as function of increasing $`t_b`$ (Fig. 14a). Here we are assuming that the main effect of the hydrostatic pressure is to increase $`t_b`$ and to leave the other parameters unchanged. The order of magnitude of $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|/N`$, which should be proportional to $`T_c`$, and its qualitative behavior in Fig. 3a are in good agreement with the experimental results for CeRh3B2 . We see from Fig. 3a that for the itinerant FM case, $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$/N is of the order of 100K. This scale is much larger than the magnitude of the RKKY interaction  ($`1^{}`$K) which is commonly used to explain the origin of the magnetic phase when the $`a`$ electrons are localized. We also find that the FM state appears close to quarter filling and disappears for $`n`$ close to $`3/8`$.

### B Uranium Compounds

The FM uranium monochalcogenides US, USe and UTe are semi-metals with large Curie temperatures of $`T_c=180K`$, $`160K`$ and $`108K`$ and ordered moments of 1.5, 2.0 and 2.2$`\mu _B`$ respectively . Most of the magnetic properties of these systems are still unexplained. The purpose of this subsection is to argue that the new mechanism for ferromagnetism introduced above is a good candidate to explain some of the mysteries related to these compounds.

Erdös and Robinson  suggested that the uranium monochalcogenides are mixed valence systems. This suggestion was reinforced by measuring the Poisson ratio as a function of the chalcogen mass with low temperature ultrasonic studies on USe and UTe . The coexistence of an intermediate valence regime and ferromagnetism is one of the unexplained properties of these compounds as it is recognized in Ref. . According to the traditional picture , the system should behave as a nonmagnetic collective Kondo state in the intermediate valence regime. In contrast to this picture, our results show that a partially saturated ferromagnetic state is stabilized in the mixed valence regime. This can explain the first striking property of the uranium monochalcogenides.

The other unusual property of these compounds is the shape of the magnetization curve versus temperature which has a maximum below $`T_c`$ . Again this is a property which can be easily explained (see the subsection about the Ce compounds) within the context of the PAM. In addition, the order of magnitude of the Curie temperature of these compounds coincides with the energy scale obtained from the PAM for the intermediate valence regime.

The uranium monochalcogenides, like the Ce based compounds above described, exhibit a non-monotonic behavior for the $`T_c`$ as a function of pressure . Fig. 14 shows that this behavior can also be explained with the PAM. Notice however that the non-monotonic behavior shown in Fig. 14 has nothing to do with a competition between Kondo and RKKY interactions.

Finally, the spin wave dispersions of these compounds also present some anomalies. For instance, neutron scattering experiments on a single-domain UTe crystal () show that for wave vectors $`q`$ perpendicular to the ordered moment the excitations become more damped with increasing $`q`$. In US only a broad continuum of magnetic response is observed . Damped and unpolarized spin waves are observed in USe . These properties indicate that the itinerant character of the $`f`$ electrons is essential to have a good description of the magnetic excitations.

### C Transition Metals

Even though the transition metals are the most well studied itinerant ferromagnets, the ultimate reason for the stabilization of the FM phase is still unknown. Since the minimal correlated model (Hubbard Hamiltonian) proposed to describe these systems does not seem to have a FM solution, it is reasonable to ask whether an extension of this minimal model, including more than one band, is necessary and enough to stabilize the FM solution. The correlated $`3d`$ band of the transition metals is hybridized with weakly correlated and dispersive $`s`$ and $`p`$ bands. This situation is similar to the case already described for the $`f`$ electron compounds. Therefore, it is natural to ask if there is a connection between the itinerant ferromagnetism of the $`f`$ and the $`d`$ electron compounds. Notice that the order of magnitude of the $`T_c`$ is the same. Following the same motivation and using DMFT, Schwieger and Nolting  concluded that the $`d`$-band ferromagnetism can be stabilized when the hybridization between both bands is small. However, these authors also find a FM solution for the one band problem.

In the case of the transition metals, the dispersion of the narrower band ($`3d`$) cannot be neglected. For this reason, we studied the stability of the FM solution as a function of $`t_a`$. We can see from Fig. 15 that the FM phase is even more stable for $`t_a0.1`$ than for $`t_a=0`$ and becomes unstable for $`t_a0.05`$. The reason for this asymmetric behavior is easy to understand in terms of the variation of $`\delta _a`$: If $`t_a`$ is negative, then the effect of $`t_a`$ on the dispersion of the $`\varphi `$ band is opposite to that of the hybridization $`V`$ (see Fig. 16). When $`t_a0.1`$, we get, for the given $`ϵ_a`$ and $`V`$, the minimum value for $`\delta _a/\mathrm{\Delta }`$ and therefore the most stable FM case. When we depart from this value of $`t_a`$, $`\delta _a/\mathrm{\Delta }`$ increases, $`|\mathrm{\Delta }E|`$ decreases, and the FM state becomes less stable.

This result indicates that the hybridization between bands can play a crucial role for the ferromagnetism of the iron group. In other words, the ferromagnetism of the transition metals can originate, at least in part, in the interplay between the correlations and the particular band structure and not solely in the intra-atomic Hund’s exchange .

## VII Conclusions

We introduced a novel mechanism for itinerant ferromagnetism which is present in a simple two band model consisting of a narrow correlated band hybridized with a dispersive and uncorrelated one. The picture just presented, combined with our previous results , allows a reconciliation of the localized and delocalized ferromagnetism pictures painted by Heisenberg  and Bloch . The hybridization between bands and the particular band structure play a crucial role in this mechanism because they generate a multi-shell structure for the correlated orbitals. This structure, when combined with the a local Coulomb repulsion, favors a ferromagnetic state. The mechanism is analogous to the one which generates the atomic Hund interaction. In this sense, this is a generalization to the solid of the atomic Hund’s rule. The mechanism works in any finite dimension.

The determination of a minimal model to explain the metallic ferromagnetism of highly correlated systems has been the object of intense effort during the last forty years. The results presented in this paper suggest that the PAM is a minimal Hamiltonian which can explain the itinerant ferromagnetism without including any explicit FM interaction.

Another important aspect of this ferromagnetic solution is its mixed valence character. According to the traditional picture , the mixed valence regime should be a PM Kondo state. The appearance of a ferromagnetic instability in this region of doping rises some questions about the entire validity of a Kondo-like description inspired by the one impurity problem. Even the PM phase obtained for $`U<U_c`$ is strongly influenced by the proximity to a FM instability .

We have discussed the relevance of these results for some $`f`$-electron compounds which are itinerant ferromagnets with high Curie temperatures ($`100^{}K`$). In particular, the are several unusual characteristics of the Ce based compounds Ce(Rh1-xRux)3B2 and LaxCe1-xRh3B2, and the uranium monochalcogenides US, USe and UTe, which can be explained, at least at a qualitative level, with the present mechanism.

We have also considered the case relevant for the iron group where the dispersion of the lower band is not negligible. The fact that the ferromagnetism is even more stable for finite values of $`t_a`$ when the hoppings of both bands have opposite signs indicates that our mechanism is relevant to explain the ferromagnetism of the transition metals, like Ni, where a correlated and narrow $`3d`$ band is hybridized with the $`4s`$ band. It suggests that the ferromagnetism in the transition metals can originate, at least in part, in the interplay between the correlations and the particular band structure, and not solely in the intra-atomic Hund’s exchange .

###### Acknowledgements.

This work was sponsored by the US DOE. We acknowledge useful discussions with A. J. Arko, B. H. Brandow, J. J. Joyce, G. Lander, J. M. Lawrence, S. Trugman, G. Ortiz, and J. L. Smith. We thank J. M. Lawrence for pointing out the experimental work on the Ce compounds. J. B. acknowledges the support of Slovene Ministry of Education, Science and Sports and FERLIN.