Quantum critical behavior of itinerant ferromagnets

Abstract

The quantum ferromagnetic transition of itinerant electrons is considered. We give a pedagogical review of recent results which show that zero-temperature soft modes that are commonly neglected, invalidate the standard Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson description of this transition. If these modes are taken into account, then the resulting order parameter field theory is nonlocal in space and time. Nevertheless, for both disordered and clean systems the critical behavior has been exactly determined for spatial dimensions d>2 and d>1, respectively. The critical exponents characterizing the paramagnetic-to-ferromagnetic transition are dimensionality dependent, and substantially different from both mean-field critical exponents, and from the classical Heisenberg exponents that characterize the transition at finite temperatures. Our results should be easily observable, particularly those for the disordered case, and experiments to check our predictions are proposed.