Intrinsic Instabilities in Fermi Glasses

Abstract

We study in this paper the effect of weak, short-ranged interaction on disordered metals. Through analysing the interaction matrix elements between different eigenstates of the non-interacting and corresponding Hartree-Fock single-particle Hamiltonian, we argue that as a result of localized single-particle eigenstates around the Fermi surface, the quasi-particle states on the Fermi surface are unstable towards formation of magnetic moments for arbitrary weak (but finite) repulsive interaction in the thermodynamic limit. This is a mechanism very different from the case of strong interaction $U\sim W_B$ ($W_B=$ bandwidth) or the quantum Griffiths effect where local moments are formed at small localized regions where coupling to the surrounding is weak. Numerical simulations are performed to verify our analysis. We further propose within a Landau Fermi-liquid-type framework that our result is applicable for general electronic systems with weak, short-ranged interaction as long as the quasi-particle states exist and are localized. An analogous result is obtained for attractive interaction, suggesting that Fermi glass state is intrinsically unstable in arbitrary dimension.