Effective electron-electron interactions and magnetic phase transition in a two-dimensional electron liquid

Abstract

We investigate the spin-dependent effective electron-electron interactions in a uniform system of two-dimensional electrons to understand the spontaneous magnetization expected to occur at very low density. For this purpose, we adopt the Kukkonen-Overhauser form for the effective interactions which are built by accurately determined local-field factors describing the charge and spin fluctuations. The critical behavior of the effective interaction for parallel spin electrons allows us to quantitatively locate the transition to the ferromagnetic state at rs ≈ 27. When the finite width effects are approximately taken into account the transition occurs at rs ≈ 30 in agreement with recent quantum Monte Carlo calculations.