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S. Bornemann, J. Minar, J. Braun, D. Ködderitzsch and H. Ebert Department Chemie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 81377 München, Germany The inclusion of magnetic interactions between electrons within fully relativistic electronic structure calculations and their effect on the magnetic anisotropy energy (MAE) in low-dimensional magnetic nanostructures is described. In this way both contributions to the MAE, i.e. the spin-orbit induced magneto-crystalline part as well as the dipolar shape anisotropy are treated on the same quantum mechanical footing. Compared to the common classical approximation to the shape anisotropy the proper quantum mechanical description gives the same result for transition metal systems with 3D and 2D dimensionality. This is demonstrated for a number of magnetic multi-layer systems AnBn (A= Fe, Co; B= Pd, Pt) and the surface layer system Fen/Au(001). We thus confirm the validity of the commonly used dipole-dipole approximation to the magnetic shape anisotropy. |
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