Flat-band ferromagnetism in the SU($N$) Hubbard and Kondo lattice models

Abstract

We develop a general theory of flat-band ferromagnetism in the SU(N ) Fermi-Hubbard model, which describes the behavior of N -component fermions with SU(N ) symmetric interactions. We focus on the case where the single-particle spectrum has a flat band and establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the SU(N ) Hubbard model to exhibit ferromagnetism when the number of particles is the same as the degeneracy. We show that the occurrence of ferromagnetism is equivalent to the irreducibility of the projection matrix onto the space of single-particle ground states. We also demonstrate that this result can be exploited to establish a rigorous result for the ferromagnetic SU(N ) Kondo lattice model with a flat band. Specifically, we prove that when the SU(N ) Hubbard model is ferromagnetic, the ferromagnetic SU(N ) Kondo lattice model with the same hopping matrix also exhibits SU(N ) ferromagnetism.