Single-ion versus exchange anisotropy in calculating anisotropic susceptibilities of thin ferromagnetic Heisenberg films within many-body Green's function theory

Abstract

We compare transverse and parallel static susceptibilities of in-plane uniaxial anisotropic ferromagnetic Heisenberg films calculated in the framework of many-body Green's function theory using single-ion anisotropies with the previously investigated case of exchange anisotropies. On the basis of the calculated observables (easy and hard axes magnetizations and susceptibilities) no significant differences are found, i. e. it is not possible to propose an experiment that might decide which kind of anisotropy is acting in an actual ferromagnetic film.