Derivation of the spin Hamiltonians for Fe in MgO

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive method combining DFT, Wannier functions, and exact diagonalization to derive effective spin Hamiltonians for Fe impurities in MgO, including effects of spin-orbit and Coulomb interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-step approach to derive spin Hamiltonians for transition metal impurities in insulators, incorporating electronic structure and many-body effects.

Findings

Successfully applied to Fe in MgO, both undistorted and Jahn-Teller distorted cases.

Provides insights into Fe impurity effects on magnetic tunnel junctions.

Establishes a framework for deriving spin models from first principles.

Abstract

A method to calculate the effective spin Hamiltonian for a transition metal impurity in a non- magnetic insulating host is presented and applied to the paradigmatic case of Fe in MgO. In a first step we calculate the electronic structure employing standard density functional theory (DFT), based on generalized-gradient approximation (GGA), using plane waves as a basis set. The corresponding basis of atomic-like maximally localized Wannier functions is derived and used to represent the DFT Hamiltonian, resulting in a tight-binding model for the atomic orbitals of the magnetic impurity. The third step is to solve, by exact numerical diagonalization, the N electron problem in the open shell of the magnetic atom, including both effect of spin-orbit and Coulomb repulsion. Finally, the low energy sector of this multi-electron Hamiltonian is mapped into effective spin models that, in addition to the spin matrices S, can also include the orbital angular momentum L when appropriate. We successfully apply the method to Fe in MgO, considering both, the undistorted and Jahn-Teller (JT) distorted cases. Implications for the influence of Fe impurities on the performance of magnetic tunnel junctions based on MgO are discussed.