Ab initio study of anisotropic effects in two-dimensional Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ using $\bf{k}$-dependent Green's functions

Abstract

In the present work, we develop the Green's function apparatus and extend its applicability to the study of microscopic anisotropic effects in real conducting materials. The problem of the previously proposed approaches written in terms of inter-atomic Green's functions is the presence of a spatial sum over all atoms of the crystal, which greatly complicates their application to systems with itinerant electrons. To provide a solution we derived expressions for magnetic torque vector and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions based on $\bf{k}$-dependent Green's functions, which allow numerical evaluations with guaranteed stability of spatial sums over the crystal lattice and moreover with much lower computational cost. Approbation of the approaches on the case of Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ monolayer, which is based on first-principles DFT calculations, confirmed the numerical stability and allowed us to reproduce the characteristic length of experimentally observed collective spin excitations in the domain structure of this promising conducting material.