Eur. Phys. J. B 55, 23-27 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00043-5

Orbital contribution to the magnetic properties of nanowires: is the orbital polarization ansatz justified?

¹ CEA Saclay, DSM/DRECAM/SPCSI, Bâtiment 462, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
² Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Université Paris Sud, Bâtiment 510, 91405 Orsay, France

Corresponding author: ^a cyrille.barreteau@cea.fr

Received: 14 September 2006
Revised: 10 January 2007
Published online: 9 February 2007

Abstract

We show that considerable orbital magnetic moments and magneto-crystalline anisotropy energies are obtained for a Fe monatomic wire described in a tight-binding method with intra-atomic electronic interactions treated in a full Hartree Fock (HF) decoupling scheme. Even though the use of the orbital polarization ansatz with simplified Hamiltonians leads to fairly good results when the spin magnetization is saturated this is not the case of unsaturated systems. We conclude that the full HF scheme is necessary to investigate low dimensional systems.