Electronic Structure of LiMnO2_{2}: A Comparative Study of the LSDA and LSDA+U methods

A first-principles electronic structure study of orthorhombic, monoclinic and rhombohedral LiMnO$_{2}$ has been carried out using the full-potential linearized augmented plane-wave method. The exchange and correlations have been treated within the local spin-density approximation (LSDA) and the LSDA+U methods. In the LSDA, the stable ground state is antiferromagnetic insulator for the orthorhombic and monoclinic structures but is ferromagnetic metal for the rhombohedral structure. The LSDA+U, on the other hand, predicts the ground state to be an antiferromagnetic insulator for all structures. We find that strong correlations change the density of states dramatically around the Fermi level. The LSDA+U predicts the nature of band gap to be a mixture of charge transfer and Mn $d \leftrightarrow d$ like excitations for orthorhombic and monoclinic LiMnO$_{2}$ and Mott-insulator for rhombohedral LiMnO$_{2}$ in agreement with the available experimental results. The inclusion of U increases the magnetic moment on Mn and gives a value in better agreement with experiment. However, Mn valency is not affected by the inclusion of U. We have also calculated X-ray emission photoelectron spectra for the orthorhombic and monoclinic LiMnO$_{2}$ by the LSDA and the LSDA+U methods. We find that LSDA+U gives better agreement with the available experimental results.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Itinerant ferromagnetism in half-metallic CoS_2

We have investigated electronic and magnetic properties of the pyrite-type CoS_2 using the linearized muffin-tin orbital (LMTO) band method. We have obtained the ferromagnetic ground state with nearly half-metallic nature. The half-metallic stability is studied by using the fixed spin moment method. The non-negligible orbital magnetic moment of Co 3d electrons is obtained as $\mu_L = 0.06 \mu_B$ in the local spin density approximation (LSDA). The calculated ratio of the orbital to spin angular momenta / = 0.15 is consistent with experiment. The effect of the Coulomb correlation between Co 3d electrons is also explored with the LSDA + U method. The Coulomb correlation at Co sites is not so large, $U \lesssim 1$ eV, and so CoS_2 is possibly categorized as an itinerant ferromagnet. It is found that the observed electronic and magnetic behaviors of CoS_2 can be described better by the LSDA than by the LSDA + U.Comment: 4 pages, 3 postscript figure

Electronic structure, magnetism and exchange integrals in transition metal oxides: role of the spin polarization of the functional in DFT+UU calculations

Density functional theory augmented with Hubbard-$U$ corrections (DFT+$U$) is currently one of the widely used methods for first-principles electronic structure modeling of insulating transition metal oxides (TMOs). Since $U$ is relatively large compared to band widths, the magnetic excitations in TMOs are expected to be well described by a Heisenberg model. However, in practice the calculated exchange parameters $J_{ij}$ depend on the magnetic configuration from which they are extracted and on the functional used to compute them. In this work we investigate how the spin polarization dependence of the underlying exchange-correlation functional influences the calculated magnetic exchange constants of TMOs. We perform a systematic study of the predictions of calculations based on the local density approximation plus $U$ (LDA+$U$) and the local spin density approximation plus $U$ (LSDA+$U$) for the electronic structures, total energies and magnetic exchange interactions $J_{ij}$'s extracted from ferromagnetic (FM) and antiferromagnetic (AFM) configurations of several transition metal oxide materials. We report that, for realistic choices of Hubbard $U$ and Hund's $J$ parameters, LSDA+$U$ and LDA+$U$ calculations result in different values of the magnetic exchange constants and band gap. The dependence of the band gap on the magnetic configuration is stronger in LDA+$U$ than in LSDA+$U$ and we argue that this is the main reason why the configuration dependence of the $J_{ij}$'s is found to be systematically more pronounced in LDA+$U$ than in LSDA+$U$ calculations. We report a very good correspondence between the computed total energies and the parameterized Heisenberg model for LDA+$U$ calculations, but not for LSDA+$U$, suggesting that LDA+$U$ is a more appropriate method for estimating exchange interactions

Orbital order and ferrimagnetic properties of the new compound Sr8CaRe3Cu4O24Sr_8 Ca Re_3 Cu_4 O_{24}

By means of the LSDA+U method and the Green function method, we investigate the electronic and magnetic properties of the new material of Sr$_8$CaRe$_3$Cu$_4$O$_{24}$. Our LSDA+U calculation shows that this system is an insulator with a net magnetic moment of 1.01 $\mu_{\rm B}$/f.u., which is in good agreement with the experiment. Magnetic moments are mainly located at Cu atoms, and the magnetic moments of neighboring Cu sites align anti-parallel. It is the non-magnetic Re atoms that induce an orbital order of $d$ electrons of Cu atoms, which is responsible for the strong exchange interaction and the high magnetic transition temperature. Based on the LSDA+U results, we introduce an effective model for the spin degrees of freedom, and investigate the finite-temperature properties by the Green function method. The obtained results are consistent with the experimental results, indicating that the spin-alternating Heisenberg model is suitable for this compound.Comment: 8 pages and 5 figur

Electronic and Magnetic Properties of single Fe atoms on a CuN Surface; Effects of Electron Correlations

The electronic structure and magnetic properties of a single Fe adatom on a CuN surface have been studied using density functional theory in the local spin density approximation (LSDA), the LSDA+U approach and the local density approximation plus dynamical mean-field theory (LDA+DMFT). The impurity problem in LDA+DMFT is solved through exact diagonalization and in the Hubbard-I approximation. The comparison of the one-particle spectral functions obtained from LSDA, LSDA+U and LDA+DMFT show the importance of dynamical correlations for the electronic structure of this system. Most importantly, we focused on the magnetic anisotropy and found that neither LSDA, nor LSDA+U can explain the measured, high values of the axial and transverse anisotropy parameters. Instead, the spin excitation energies obtained from our LDA+DMFT approach with exact diagonalization agree significantly better with experimental data. This affirms the importance of treating fluctuating magnetic moments through a realistic many-body treatment when describing this class of nano-magnetic systems. Moreover, it facilitates insight to the role of the hybridization with surrounding orbitals.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Electronic structure of self-assembled quantum dots: comparison between density functional theory and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo

We have calculated the exchange, correlation, and total electronic energy of a realistic InAs self-assembled quantum dot embedded in a GaAs matrix as a function of the number of electrons in the dot. The many-body interactions have been treated using the local spin density approximation (LSDA) to density functional theory (DFT) and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC), so that we may quantify the error introduced by LSDA. The comparison shows that the LSDA errors are about 1-2 meV per electron for the system considered. These errors are small enough to justify the use of LSDA calculations to test models of self-assembled dots against current experimental measurements.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Physica