Spin susceptibility of interacting two-dimensional electrons in the presence of spin-orbit coupling

Robert Andrzej Żak, Dmitrii L. Maslov, and Daniel Loss
Phys. Rev. B 82, 115415 – Published 9 September 2010

Abstract

A long-range interaction via virtual particle-hole pairs between Fermi-liquid quasiparticles leads to a nonanalytic behavior of the spin susceptibility χ as a function of the temperature (T), magnetic field (B), and wave number. In this paper, we study the effect of the Rashba spin-orbit interaction (SOI) on the nonanalytic behavior of χ for a two-dimensional electron liquid. Although the SOI breaks the SU(2) symmetry, it does not eliminate nonanalyticity but rather makes it anisotropic: while the linear scaling of χzz with T and |B| saturates at the energy scale set by the SOI, that of χxx (=χyy) continues through this energy scale until renormalization of the electron-electron interaction in the Cooper channel becomes important. We show that the renormalization group flow in the Cooper channel has a nontrivial fixed point and study the consequences of this fixed point for the nonanalytic behavior of χ. An immediate consequence of SOI-induced anisotropy in the nonanalytic behavior of χ is a possible instability of a second-order ferromagnetic quantum phase transition with respect to a first-order transition to an XY ferromagnetic state.

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  • Received 11 May 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.82.115415

©2010 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Robert Andrzej Żak1, Dmitrii L. Maslov2, and Daniel Loss1

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Florida, P.O. Box 118440, Gainesville, Florida 32611-8440, USA

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Vol. 82, Iss. 11 — 15 September 2010

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