Electron spin resonance in a two-dimensional Fermi liquid with spin-orbit coupling

Abstract

Electron spin resonance (ESR) is usually interpreted as a single-particle phenomenon protected from the effect of many-body correlations. We show that this is not the case in a two-dimensional Fermi liquid (FL) with spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Depending on whether the magnetic field is below or above some critical value, ESR in such a system probes up to three collective chiral-spin modes, augmented by the presence of the field, or the Larmor mode, augmented both by SOC and FL renormalizations. We argue that ESR can be used as a probe not only for SOC but also for many-body physics.