English

Frustrated Magnetic Interactions, Giant Magneto-Elastic Coupling, and Magnetic Phonons in Iron-Pnictides

Superconductivity 2010-06-23 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

We present a detailed first principles study of Fe-pnictides with particular emphasis on competing magnetic interactions, structural phase transition, giant magneto-elastic coupling and its effect on phonons. The exchange interactions Ji,j(R)J_{i,j}(R) are calculated up to 12\approx 12 \AA .Wefindthat. We find that J_{i,j}(R)hasanoscillatorycharacterwithanenvelopdecayingas has an oscillatory character with an envelop decaying as 1/R^3alongthestripedirectionwhileitisveryshortrangealongthediagonaldirectionandantiferromagnetic.Abriefdiscussionoftheneutronscatteringdeterminationoftheseexchangeconstantsfromasinglecrystalsamplewithorthorhombictwinningisgiven.Thelatticeparameterdependenceoftheexchangeconstants, along the stripe-direction while it is very short range along the diagonal direction and antiferromagnetic. A brief discussion of the neutron scattering determination of these exchange constants from a single crystal sample with orthorhombic twinning is given. The lattice parameter dependence of the exchange constants, dJ_{i,j}/daarecalculatedforasimplespinPeierlslikemodeltoexplainthefinedetailsofthetetragonalorthorhombicphasetransition.Wethendiscussgiantmagnetoelasticeffectsinthesesystems.WeshowthatwhentheFespinisturnedofftheoptimizedcvaluesareshorterthanexperimetnalvaluesby1.4A˚ are calculated for a simple spin-Peierls like model to explain the fine details of the tetragonal-orthorhombic phase transition. We then discuss giant magneto-elastic effects in these systems. We show that when the Fe-spin is turned off the optimized c-values are shorter than experimetnal values by 1.4 \AA forCaFe for CaFe_2AsAs_2,by0.4A˚, by 0.4 \AA forBaFe for BaFe_2AsAs_2,andby0.13A˚, and by 0.13 \AA $ for LaOFeAs. Finally, we show that Fe-spin is also required to obtain the right phonon energies, in particular As c-polarized and Fe-Fe in-plane modes. Since treating iron as magnetic ion always gives much better results than non-magnetic ones and since there is no large c-axis reduction during the normal to superconducting phase transition, the iron magnetic moment should be present in Fe-pnictides at all times. We discuss the implications of our results on the mechanism of superconductivity in these fascinating Fe-pnictide systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0902.3462,
  title  = {Frustrated Magnetic Interactions, Giant Magneto-Elastic Coupling, and Magnetic Phonons in Iron-Pnictides},
  author = {Taner Yildirim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0902.3462},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

New Results: Fe-mangetism is required to explain the ROOM TEMPERATURE phonon DOS (Fig. 21); Jij(R) up to 12 Ang, indicating that J2 is short range while J1 decays as 1/R^3 (Fig. 7) ; A simple spin-Peierles model (i.e. dJ/da) (see Fig. 11-12); Spin-wave spectrum to determine the sign of exchange interaction (see Fig. 8-9)