A number of recent experiments report spin polarization in quantum wires in
the absence of magnetic fields. These observations are in apparent
contradiction with the Lieb-Mattis theorem, which forbids spontaneous spin
polarization in one dimension. We show that sufficiently strong interactions
between electrons induce deviations from the strictly one-dimensional geometry
and indeed give rise to a ferromagnetic ground state in a certain range of
electron densities.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure