548 Ch.

10 The Correlated Metallic State

of the susceptibility and of the specific heat follow the same trend13.
The resistivity plots show that with increasing 2, the system be-
comes less and less metallic. In principle, this could arise from either a
descreasing number of charge carriers, or from an increased scattering

cient which, according to RH -

rate. The decisive experiment is the measurement of the Hall coeffi-
llnlel, gives the concentration and
character of the charge carriers. The data shown in Fig. 10.6 clearly
prove that the charge carriers are electron-like and their concentration
is n 2. This finding is in accordance with our reasoning (Sec. 10.4)
N

that the strongly correlated metallic state has a. large (Luttinger) Fermi
surface. The number of charge carriers keeps on increasing right up to
the metal-insulator transition where it suddenly drops to zero.

10.6 Discussion and Outlook

On the whole, we may be inclined to feel satisfied with the progress
made in this chapter: we developed a pictorial way of thinking about
correlation phenomena, obtained a number of nice results with relatively
little effort, and these seem to be applicable to real physical systems.
Remembering, however, that this was based on an approximate treat-
ment of a simple-looking trial state for a model Hamiltonian, we should
be worried about the following points:
1. Is the approximation good enough? Our results do not follow
strictly from the Gutawiller trial state (9.16) but were derived using
the Gutzwiller approximation. What is the nature of the Gutzwiller
approximation? Does it ever become exact? If it is not exact, did we
merely make a small quantitative mistake, or is it possible that the true
consequences of the Gutzwiller Ansatz are drastically different from our
findings?
2. Is the trial state good enough? We were pointing it out that
getting nd + 0 at the Brinkman-Rice transition must be wrong. Could

-
l 3 This should be basically right but we might be troubled by the following obser-
vation: the approximately constant value of the Wilson ratio is 2 down to x 0.1N

where the electron gas is dilute and we would rather expect that the ratio approaches
the free-electron valueN 1. It can be argued that the observed behaviour can be
ascribed to a contribution from the hitherto neglected orbital magnetic moment (1301.