Magnetism, magneto-crystalline anisotropy, magnetostriction and MOKE at surfaces and interfaces

A major issue for first-principles theory in magnetism is the treatment of the weak spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and its subsequent effects in magnetic transition metal bulk, surfaces and multilayers. Using either a perturbative or a self-consistent approach for SOC, we have recently investigated important phenomena such as magnetic crystalline anisotropy (MCA), magnetostriction, and magneto-optical Kerr effects (MOKE) in various transition metal systems using the highly precise local density full-potential linearized augmented plane wave (FLAPW) method. With the aid of accurate total energy and atomic force approaches based on the LDA and GGA formalisms, the atomic structures of all the surfaces and interfaces are fully relaxed. Excellent agreement with experiment has been achieved for most of the systems investigated in terms of their equilibrium geometries, MCA energies, magnetostrictive coefficients and MOKE spectra. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.