English

General spin models from noncollinear spin density functional theory and spin-cluster expansion

Materials Science 2026-05-26 v3

Abstract

We present a data-efficient framework for constructing general classical spin Hamiltonians by combining the spin-cluster expansion (SCE) with fully self-consistent noncollinear spin density functional theory (DFT). The key idea is to fit the SCE model to magnetic torques rather than to total energies. Because torques are site-resolved vectors, each spin configuration provides many informative regression targets, improving conditioning and substantially reducing the number of required DFT calculations, especially for large supercells. Applied to the B20-type chiral magnets Mn1xFexGe{\rm Mn}_{1-x}{\rm Fe}_{x}{\rm Ge} and Fe1yCoyGe{\rm Fe}_{1-y}{\rm Co}_{y}{\rm Ge}, the resulting SCE models determine full pairwise exchange tensors -- including isotropic exchange, symmetric anisotropic exchange, and the Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya interaction -- and predict the helical spin period via a micromagnetic mapping. The composition trends and the divergence of the period at the chirality sign-change point are well reproduced, in agreement with experiment. Moreover, the systematic nature of SCE enables controlled assessment of interaction order: as the training spin configurations become more disordered, the lowest-order model loses torque accuracy, whereas including higher-order interactions restores predictive power. These advances enable near-DFT-accurate spin models for finite-temperature magnetism and complex spin textures at modest computational cost, providing an extensible route to quantitative first-principles parameterization and predictive materials design. An open-source implementation is available as a Julia package, \textit{Magesty.jl}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.04458,
  title  = {General spin models from noncollinear spin density functional theory and spin-cluster expansion},
  author = {Tomonori Tanaka and Yoshihiro Gohda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.04458},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:08:52.379Z