Possible Nematic Order Driven by Magnetic Fluctuations in Iron Pnictides

TL;DR

This paper investigates how magnetic fluctuations can induce nematic order in iron pnictides, revealing a potential instability in the isotropic metallic phase that leads to anisotropic Fermi surface distortions.

Contribution

It identifies a magnetic fluctuation-driven nematic instability in iron pnictides using a functional integral approach and mean field analysis.

Findings

Nematic order can be driven by magnetic fluctuations.

The ground state remains metallic with distorted Fermi pockets.

The nematic phase breaks C4 symmetry but preserves translational symmetry.

Abstract

In this paper, instabilities of the isotropic metallic phase in iron pnictides are investigated. The relevant quartic fermionic interaction terms in the model are identified using phase space arguments. Using the functional integral formalism, a Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation is used to decouple these quartic terms. This procedure introduces several bosonic fields which describe the low-energy collective modes of the system. By studying the behavior of these collective modes, a possible instability is found in the forward scattering channel of the isotropic phase driven by magnetic fluctuations. Using mean field analysis, we obtain a static and homogeneous ground state. This ground state is metallic, but the electron Fermi pockets are distorted unequally at different pockets in momentum space. This results in a desirable nematic ordering which breaks the lattice C4 symmetry but preserves translational symmetry and may explain several experimental observations.