We discuss the ground state and some excited states of the half-filled Hubbard model defined on an open chain with L sites, where only one of the boundary sites has a different value of chemical potential. We consider the case when the boundary site has a negative chemical potential -p and the Hubbard coupling U is positive. By an analytic method we show that when p is larger than the transfer integral some of the ground-state solutions of the Bethe ansatz equations become complex-valued. It

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... lows that there is a "surface phase transition" at some critical value p_c; when pp_c.