Coulomb-Enhanced Spin-Orbit Splitting The Missing Piece in the Sr2RhO4 Puzzle.pdf

a r X i v : 0 8 0 4 .0 7 6 2 v 2 [ c o n d - m a t .s t r - e l ] 1 8 J u l 2 0 0 8 Coulomb-Enhanced Spin-Orbit Splitting: The Missing Piece in the Sr2RhO4 Puzzle Guo-Qiang Liu, V. N. Antonov, O. Jepsen, and O.K. Andersen. Max-Planck Institut fu?r Festko?rperforschung, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany (Dated: July 18, 2008) The outstanding discrepancy between the measured and calculated (local-density approximation) Fermi surfaces in the well-characterized, paramagnetic Fermi liquid Sr2RhO4 is resolved by including the spin-orbit coupling and Coulomb repulsion. This results in an effective spin-orbit coupling constant enhanced 2.15 times over the bare value. A simple formalism allows discussion of other systems. For Sr2RhO4, the experimental specific-heat and mass enhancements are found to be 2.2. PACS numbers: 71.18.+y, 71.20.-b, 71.30.+h Since the discoveries of high-temperature supercon- ductivity and colossal magnetoresistance in Mott insula- tors made metallic by hole-doping, transition-metal ox- ides have remained at the forefront of research. Their many lattice and electronic (orbital, charge, and spin) degrees of freedom are coupled by effective interactions (electron-phonon, hopping, t, Coulomb repulsion, U, and Hunds-rule coupling, J), and when some of these are of similar magnitude, competing phases may exist in the region of controllable compositions, fields, and tempera- tures. The interactions tend to remove low-energy de- grees of freedom, e.g. to reduce the metallicity. This rarely happens by merely shifting spectral weight from a quasiparticle band into incoherent Hubbard bands, as in the U/t-driven metal-insulator transition for the single-band Hubbard model, but is usually assisted by lattice distortions which break the degeneracy of low- energy orbitals and split the corresponding quasiparti- cle –or partly incoherent– bands away from the chem- ical potential. According to recent calculations using the local density-functional plus dynamical me