Correlation Effects in Orbital Magnetism

Abstract: Orbital magnetization is known empirically to play an important role in several magnetic phenomena, such as permanent magnetism and ferromagnetic superconductivity. Within the recently developed ''modern theory of orbital magnetization'', theoretical insight has been gained into the nature of this often neglected contribution to magnetism, but is based on an underlying mean-field approximation. From this theory, a few treatments have emerged which also take into account correlations beyond the mean-field approximation. Here, we apply the scheme developed in a previous work [Phys. Rev. B ${\bf \text{93}}$, 161104(R) (2016)] to the Haldane-Hubbard model to investigate the effect of charge fluctuations on the orbital magnetization within the $GW$ approximation. Qualitatively, we are led to distinguish between two quite different situations: (i) When the lattice potential is larger than the nearest neighbor hopping, the correlations are found to boost the orbital magnetization. (ii) If the nearest neighbor hopping is instead larger than the lattice potential, the correlations reduce the magnetization.