Ordering instability of weakly interacting electrons in a dirty metal

Abstract

In a dirty metal, electron-electron interactions in the spin-triplet channel lead to singular corrections to a variety of physical quantities. We show that these singularities herald the emergence of ferromagnetism. We calculate the effective action for the magnetic moment of weakly-interacting electrons in a dirty metal and show that a state with finite ferromagnetic moment minimizes this effective action. The saddle-point approximation is exact in an appropriate large-N limit. We discuss the physics of the ferromagnetic state with particular regard to thermal fluctuations and localization effects.