  The electronic spin-orbit coupling in carbon nanotubes is strongly enhanced
by the curvature of the tube surface and has important effects on the
single-particle spectrum. Here, we include the full spin-orbit interaction in
the formulation of the effective low-energy theory for interacting electrons in
metallic single-wall carbon nanotubes and study its consequences. The resulting
theory is a four-channel Luttinger liquid, where spin and charge modes are
mixed. We show that the analytic structure of the spectral function is strongly
affected by this mixing, which can provide an experimental signature of the
spin-orbit interaction.
