Spin-orbital effects in magnetized quantum wires and spin chains

Abstract

We present analysis of the interacting quantum wire problem in the presence of magnetic field and spin-orbital interaction. We show that an interesting interplay of Zeeman and spin-orbit terms, facilitated by the electron-electron interaction, results in the spin-density wave (SDW) state when the magnetic-field and spin-orbit axes are orthogonal. We show that this instability is enhanced in a closely related problem of Heisenberg spin chain with asymmetric uniform Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction. Magnetic field in the direction perpendicular to the DM anisotropy axis results in staggered long-range magnetic order along the orthogonal to the applied field direction. We explore consequences of the uniform DM interaction for the electron-spin-resonance (ESR) measurements, and point out that they provide way to probe right- and left-moving excitations of the spin chain separately.