Spin tunneling in magnetic molecules: Quantitative estimates for Fe8 clusters

Spin tunneling in the particular case of the magnetic molecular cluster octanuclear iron(III), Fe8, is treated by an effective Hamiltonian that allows for an angle-based description of the process. The presence of an external magnetic field along the easy axis is also taken into account in this description. Analytic expressions for the energy levels and barriers are obtained from a harmonic approximation of the potential function which give results in good agreement with the experimental results. The energy splittings due to spin tunneling is treated in an adapted WKB approach and it is shown that the present description can give results to a reliable degree of accuracy.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, preprint submitted to Physica

On the q-deformation of the NJL model

Using a q-deformed fermionic algebra we perform explicitly a deformation of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) Hamiltonian. In the Bogoliubov-Valatin approach we obtain the deformed version of the functional for the total energy, which is minimized to obtain the corresponding gap equation. The breaking of chiral symmetry and its restoration in the limit $q \to 0$ are then discussed.Comment: 5 eps figure