Itinerant ferromagnetism, i.e. spontaneous polarization of non-localized particles, is expected to occur for strong repulsive interactions in a spin-1/2 Fermi system. However, this state has proven notoriously hard to find experimentally, both in ultracold gases and in solids. This raises questions about the stability of the itinerant ferromagnetic state itself. Here we develop a new approach to describe both the direct and exchange interactions for a general interaction potential in the path-integral formalism and we apply this method to itinerant ferromagnetism in three-dimensional ultracold Fermi gases. We show that the exchange interactions are lost in the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation and we propose to explicitly include the exchange effects in a new modified interaction potential. In the saddle-point approximation, the effect of interactions can be taken into account using only three parameters. If the interactions become too strong, all saddle points become unstable to density fluctuations. This greatly restricts the area in the phase diagram where uniform itinerant ferromagnetism is expected to occur.
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