Effects of spin-orbit coupling and many-body interactions on the electronic structure of Sr₂RuO₄

Abstract

The aim of the project is to investigate the effects of spin-orbit coupling and many-body interactions on the band structure of the single-layered strontium ruthenate Sr₂RuO₄. This material belongs to the large family of strongly correlated electron systems in which electron-electron interaction plays a crucial role in determining the macroscopic properties. The experimental method used for this purpose is Angular Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES), which probes the single-particle spectral function and allows direct measurements of the quasi-particle band structure. The analysis is based on comparison of experimental data with electronic structure calculations. Typical methods for the band structure calculations including density functional theory (DFT) in the local density approximation (LDA) and tight-binding calculations (TB) are one-electron approximations and do not give insight into many-body interactions. However, comparing the measured band structures with calculated ones allows estimating the strength of the interactions in the considered system. In Chapter 1 the earlier work on Sr₂RuO₄, which is relevant to this project is presented. This chapter is an introduction to the data analysis and discussion of the results. In Chapter 2 we describe the experimental setup, theoretical principles of the measurement and summarize important improvements made during this project. In Chapter 3 we give a brief introduction into density functional theory and describe methods used within DFT to calculate the band structure. We further give a brief description of a tight binding model for Sr₂RuO₄. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to present the effects of spin-orbit coupling on the band structure of Sr₂RuO₄. In particular, we use a tight binding model to simulate the anisotropy of the Zeeman splitting found experimentally. In Chapter 4 we present the ARPES results, their analysis and discussion. A particular focus is placed on the discussion of the surface layer Fermi surface topology and on the discovery of strong momentum dependence of the mass renormalization factors of the bulk β and γ bands.