Theoretical Study of Spin-wave Effects in Quantum Ferromagnets

In this dissertation, we examine quantum ferromagnets and determine various effects of the magnetic Goldstone modes or "magnons'' in these systems. Firstly, we calculate the magnon contribution to the transport relaxation rate of conduction electrons in metallic ferromagnets and find that at asymptotically low temperatures, the contribution behaves as T^2 exp(-T_0/T) and not as T^2 predicted previously. To perform these calculations, we derive and use a very general effective theory for metallic ferromagnets. This activation barrier-like behavior is due to the fact that spin waves only couple electrons from different Stoner subbands that arise from the splitting of the conduction band in presence of a nonzero magnetization. The T^2 behavior is found to be valid only in a pre-asymptotic temperature window. The temperature scale T_0 is the energy of the least energetic ferromagnon that couples electrons of different spins. Second, we discuss magnon-induced long-range correlation functions in quantum magnets. In the ordered phases of both classical ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, the long-range correlations induced by the magnons lead to a singular wavenumber dependence of the longitudinal order-parameter susceptibility in spatial dimensions 2<d