Theory of photoemission and inverse-photoemission spectra of highly correlated electron systems: A weak-coupling 1/Nexpansion

An N-fold-degenerate Hubbard model is examined in the weak-coupling regime. The one-electron Green's function is calculated from a systematic expansion of the irreducible self-energy in powers of 1/N. To lowest order in the expansion, one obtains a trivial mean-field theory. In the next leading order in 1/N, one finds that the dynamics are dominated by bosonlike collective excitations. The resulting expansion has the characteristics of the standard weak-coupling field theory, except the inclusion of the 1/N factors extends the regime of applicability to include Stoner-like enhancement factors which can be N times larger. The joint valence-band photoemission and inverse-photoemission spectrum is given by the trace of the imaginary part of the one-electron Green's function. The electronic spectrum has been calculated by truncating the series expansion for the self-energy in the lowest nontrivial order of 1/N. For small values of the Coulomb interaction between the electrons, the spectrum reduces to the form obtained by calculating the self-energy to second order in the Coulomb interaction. The spectra shows a narrowing of the band in the vicinity of the Fermi level and long high-energy band tails. When the boson spectrum softens, indicating the vicinity of a phase transition, the electronic spectrum shows the appearance of satellites. The results are compared with experimental observations of anomalies in the electronic spectra of uranium-based systems. The relation between the electronic spectrum and the thermodynamic mass enhancements is also discussed.