Theoretical study of the effect of temperature on the magnetism of transition metal clusters

¹ Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, FORTH - P.O. Box 1527 71110 Heraklio, Crete, Greece
² Department of Physics, University of Crete - P.O. Box 2208 71003 Heraklio, Crete, Greece
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0055, USA
⁴ Center for Computational Sciences, University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0045, USA

Corresponding authors: andriot@iesl.forth.gr fthenak@iesl.forth.gr madhu@ccs.uky.edu

Received: 29 May 2006
Accepted: 17 October 2006

Abstract

The temperature effects on the magnetic properties of transition metal clusters are investigated by computer simulations which combine the classical potential approximation with the generalization of our recently proposed tight-binding molecular-dynamics method that includes explicit incorporation of spin-orbit interactions and spin fluctuations. The efficacy of this new method is demonstrated by application to small and intermediate size Ni_n-clusters () for which experimental data are available for comparison. The results obtained are in good agreement with the recent experimental findings.