Evolution of magnetism of Cr nanoclusters on a Au(111) surface

TL;DR

This study uses electronic structure calculations to explore how the magnetic properties of Cr nanoclusters on a Au(111) surface evolve with cluster size, revealing insights into their magnetic moments and Kondo behavior.

Contribution

It provides detailed theoretical analysis of the structural, electronic, and magnetic properties of Cr nanoclusters, highlighting the origin of the absence of the Kondo effect and the nature of their magnetic ordering.

Findings

Cr monomer prefers fcc hollow site with 3.93 μB magnetic moment.

Cr dimer exhibits antiferromagnetic order with near-zero magnetic moment.

Cr trimer shows non-collinear magnetism with zero net moment.

Abstract

We have carried out collinear and non-collinear electronic structure calculations to investigate the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of isolated Cr atoms, dimers and compact trimers. We find that the Cr monomer prefers to adsrob on the fcc hollow site with a binding energy of 3.13 eV and a magnetic moment of of 3.93 $\mu_B$. The calculated Kondo temperature of 0.7 K for the monomer is consistent with the lack of a Kondo peak in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments at 7 K. The compact Cr dimer orders antiferromagnetically and its bond length contracts to 1.72 $\AA$ close to the value for the free-standing Cr dimer. The very low magnetic moment of 0.005 $\mu_B$ for the Cr atoms in the dimer is due to the strong $d-d$ hybridization between the Cr adatoms. Thus, these calculations reveal that the absence of the Kondo effect observed in STM experiments is due to the small local moments rather than the Kondo quenching of the local moments suggested experimentally. The Cr compact trimer exhibits non-collinear co-planar magnetism with vanishing net magnetic moment in agreement with experiment.