Magnetism of small transition metal clusters and the effects of isomerisation

Abstract

We investigate the magnetic properties of small transition metal clusters using a simple statistical model, which requires some input data from ab initio spin-density functional calculations. In our study we consider a thermodynamically equilibrated ensemble of clusters with different structures, spin multiplicities, and ground state energies. We calculate the physical properties of this system by weighting the individual configurations according to the Boltzmann statistics. We find that presence of isomers with very similar ground state energies, yet very different magnetic properties, gives rise to a rich magnetic behaviour of the system which differs significantly from what would be expected for single configurations. We apply the present model to to determine the magnetic susceptibility of a cluster ensemble of Langevin paramagnets. Our results show that some of the anomalies in the magnetic behaviour of transition metal clusters might be understood in the framework of our model which is, of course, limited by the extremely high computational effort needed to obtain the input data.