Orbital magnetization in periodic insulators
Materials Science
2007-05-23 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Abstract
Working in the Wannier representation, we derive an expression for the orbital magnetization of a periodic insulator. The magnetization is shown to be comprised of two contributions, an obvious one associated with the internal circulation of bulk-like Wannier functions in the interior, and an unexpected one arising from net currents carried by Wannier functions near the surface. Each contribution can be expressed as a bulk property in terms of Bloch functions in a gauge-invariant way. Our expression is verified by comparing numerical tight-binding calculations for finite and periodic samples.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0505518,
title = {Orbital magnetization in periodic insulators},
author = {T. Thonhauser and Davide Ceresoli and David Vanderbilt and R. Resta},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0505518},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
submitted to PRL; signs corrected in Eqs. (11), (12), (19), and (20)