Fluctuations of g-factors in metal nanoparticles: Effects of electron-electron interaction and spin-orbit scattering

TL;DR

This paper studies how electron-electron interactions and spin-orbit scattering influence the distribution of g-factors in metal nanoparticles, revealing that interactions can significantly enhance g-factor fluctuations and allow values exceeding two.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical analysis combining random matrix theory to explore the effects of interactions and spin-orbit scattering on g-factor fluctuations in nanoparticles.

Findings

Electron-electron interactions increase g-factor fluctuations.

Interactions can lead to g-factors larger than two.

Small interaction strengths significantly impact g-factor distributions.

Abstract

We investigate the combined effect of spin-orbit scattering and electron-electron interactions on the probability distribution of $g$-factors of metal nanoparticles. Using random matrix theory, we find that even a relatively small interaction strength %(ratio of exchange constant $J$ and mean level %spacing $\spacing$ $\simeq 0.3$) significantly increases $g$-factor fluctuations for not-too-strong spin-orbit scattering (ratio of spin-orbit rate and single-electron level spacing $1/\tau_{\rm so} \spacing \lesssim 1$), and leads to the possibility to observe $g$-factors larger than two.