Gaussian Effective Potential and Antiferromagnetism in the Hubbard Model

The Gaussian Effective Potential (GEP) is shown to be a useful variational tool for the study of the magnetic properties of strongly correlated electronic systems. The GEP is derived for a single band Hubbard model on a two-dimensional bi-partite square lattice in the strong coupling regime. At half-filling the antiferromagnetic order parameter emerges as the minimum of the effective potential with an accuracy which improves over RPA calculations and is very close to that achieved by Monte Carlo simulations. Extensions to other magnetic systems are discussed.