Magnetism and Magnetic Interactions at Transition Metal Surfaces and Interfaces

ABSTRACTIn the exciting field of low dimensional magnetic systems including surfaces, interfaces and thin-films, local spin density (LSD) functional ab initio electronic structure calculations have played a key role by not only providing a clearer understanding of the experimental observations but also predicting new systems with desired properties. Our extensive calculated results demonstrate that: (i) Magnetic clean surfaces or interfaces with inert substrates undergo strong magnetic moment enhancements; (ii) the strong interaction with nonmagnetic transition metals diminishes (completely in some cases) the ferromagnetism and usually stabilizes the antiferromag-netic configuration. By including spin-orbit coupling as a perturbation, (i) reliable results for the Magneto-crystalline anisotropy of ultra-thin films can be obtained using the state-tracking procedure, although the anisotropy energy is a few tenths of a MeV; (ii) spectra of the Magneto-optical Kerr effects and magnetic circular dichroism in the soft x-ray region can be determined.