Spin tunnelling in Molecular Magnets

Abstract

We study spin tunneling in magnetic molecules, with special reference to Fe8. The article aims to give a pedagogical discussion of what is meant by the tunneling of a spin, and how tunneling amplitudes or energy level splittings may be calculated using path integral and discrete phase integral methods. In the case of Fe8, an issue of great interest is the oscillatory tunnel splittings as a function of applied magnetic field that have recently been observed. These oscillations are due to the occurrence of diabolical points in the magnetic field space. It is shown how this effect comes about in both the path-integral and the discrete phase integral methods. In the former it arises due to the presence of a Berry-like phase in the action, which gives rise to an interference between tunneling trajectories. In the latter, it arises due to the presence of further neighbor terms in the recursion relation for the energy eigenfunction. These terms give rise to turning points which have no analog in the one-dimensional continuum quasiclassical method. Explicit results are obtained for the location of the diabolical points in Fe8.