Unitary transformation treatment of a single hole in an Ising antiferromagnet

The behavior of a single hole in a two-dimensional Ising antiferromagnet (t-J ^z model), is studied in the generalized Dyson-Maleev representation, where the spins are mapped on boson operators and the hole is described as a spinless fermion. The formal similarity with Fröhlich's polaron Hamiltonian suggests that thet-J ^z model can be approximately diagonalized by means of two successive unitary transformations, analogous to those used by Lee, Low, and Pines in their intermediate-coupling treatment of the polaron. Our approach yields an upper bound to the exact ground state energy, as well as the corresponding ground state eigenvector. Fork=0 our energy bound is remarkably close to the result of the self-consistent Born approximation over a wide range of the coupling parameter, which includes the range typically assumed for the high-T _c materials. The ground state eigenvector is used to calculate the spatial distribution of bosons (spin deviations) surrounding the hole. Here our results are qualitatively very similar to those obtained in previous work, showing that our ground state eigenvector accounts quite well for the small size of the “spin polaron” in thet-J ^z model.