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

Robert Andrzej Zak, Dmitrii L. Maslov, Daniel Loss

Published 2010-05-11, updated 2010-09-15Version 2

A long-range interaction via virtual particle-hole pairs between Fermi-liquid quasiparticles leads to a nonanalytic behavior of the spin susceptibility $\chi$ as a function of the temperature ($T$), magnetic field ($\mathbf{B}$), and wavenumber. In this paper, we study the effect of the Rashba spin-orbit interaction (SOI) on the nonanalytic behavior of $\chi$ 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 $\chi_{zz}$ with $T$ and $|\mathbf{B}|$ saturates at the energy scale set by the SOI, that of $\chi_{xx}$ ($=\chi_{yy}$) 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 non-trivial fixed point, and study the consequences of this fixed point for the nonanalytic behavior of $\chi$. An immediate consequence of SOI-induced anisotropy in the nonanalytic behavior of $\chi$ is a possible instability of a second-order ferromagnetic quantum phase transition with respect to a first-order transition to an XY ferromagnetic state.