Surface-induced magnetic anisotropy for impurity spins in granular AuFe films

Abstract

The theory of the surface-induced anisotropy is extended to the case of granular films of dilute magnetic alloys. Since the surface-induced blocking of a magnetic-impurity spin appears to be very sensitive to the specific polycrystalline structure, we speculate that the apparent discrepancy between the experimental results of different groups for the size dependence of the Kondo resistivity can be linked to different microstructure of the samples. We apply our model to calculate the magnetization of impurity spins in small AuFe grains and to interpret the experimental data on the anomalous Hall effect in thin Fe doped Au films.