Calculating spin-lattice interactions in ferro- and antiferromagnets: the role of symmetry, dimension and frustration

Abstract

Recently, the interplay between spin and lattice degrees of freedom has gained a lot of attention due to its importance for various fundamental phenomena as well as for spintronic and magnonic applications. Examples are ultrafast angular momentum transfer between the spin and lattice subsystems during ultrafast demagnetization, frustration driven by structural distortions in transition metal oxides, or in acoustically driven spin-wave resonances. In this work, we provide a systematic analysis of spin-lattice interactions for ferro- and antiferromagnetic materials and focus on the role of lattice symmetries and dimensions, magnetic order, and the relevance of spin-lattice interactions for angular momentum transfer as well as magnetic frustration. For this purpose, we use a recently developed scheme which allows an efficient calculation of spin-lattice interaction tensors from first principles. In addition to that, we provide a more accurate and self consistent scheme to calculate ab initio spin lattice interactions by using embedded clusters which allows to benchmark the performance of the scheme introduced previously.