Imaging spin-inelastic Friedel oscillations emerging from magnetic impurities

TL;DR

This paper predicts and discusses spin-inelastic Friedel oscillations caused by magnetic impurities, extending previous concepts to spin-polarized systems and proposing STM measurements of these oscillations.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of spin-inelastic Friedel oscillations in spin-polarized systems and suggests experimental detection via STM imaging of $d^2I/dV^2$ oscillations.

Findings

Inelastic scattering of magnetic impurities generates oscillations in $d^2I/dV^2$.

These oscillations are analogous to Friedel oscillations but involve inelastic spin transitions.

The work extends previous spin-unpolarized models to spin-polarized systems.

Abstract

We consider inelastic scattering of localized magnetic moments coupled with the electrons on the surface. We argue that spin-inelastic transitions of the magnetic impurities generate oscillations at a momentum $k$, corresponding to the inelastic mode, in the second derivative of the current with respect to voltage $d^2I/dV^2$. These oscillations are similar in nature to Friedel oscillations. Inelastic Friedel oscillations, which were previously proposed for spin-unpolarized set-up, is here extended for spin-polarized systems. We propose to use scanning tunneling microscope to measure spin-inelastic scattering generated at the impurity spin by imaging the $d^2I/dV^2$ oscillations on the metal surface.