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Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy are powerful techniques for the study of single magnetic impurities adsorbed on metallic surfaces.
Of special interest are the recent results reported for copper nitride [1], where the substrate anisotropy determines the spin state of the magnetic adatom and the occurrence of Kondo screening [2]. While spin 1/2 Kondo systems have been investigated extensively in theory and
experiments, magnetic atoms may present a larger spin, which makes the properties of the system more complex.
We study the Kondo resonance of magnetic atoms in a variety of surface configurations using STM-based tunneling spectroscopy.
The presence of a magnetic field or antiferromagnetic exchange results in a splitting of the Kondo resonance. We investigate the evolution of this splitting, when changing the distance between neighbor adatoms.
By altering the properties of the substrate, we found that small variations of the surface anisotropy and the surface states seem to have a significant effect in the strength of the Kondo screening.
[1] C. F. Hirjibehedin, C.-Y. Lin, A. F. Otte, M. Ternes, C. P. Lutz, B. A. Jones, A. J. Heinrich, Science 317, 1199 (2007) [2] A. F. Otte, M. Ternes, K. von Bergmann, S. Loth, H. Brune, C. P. Lutz, C. F. Hirjibehedin, and A. J. Heinrich, Nature Physics 4, 847 (2008) |
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