Ground state configurations in antiferromagnetic ultrathin films with dipolar anisotropy

Abstract

The formalism developed in a previous work to calculate the dipolar energy in quasi-two-dimensional crystals with ferromagnetic order is now extended to collinear antiferromagnetic order. Numerical calculations of the dipolar energy are carried out for systems with tetragonally distorted fcc [001] structures, the case of NiO and MnO ultrathin film grown in non-magnetic substrates, where the magnetic phase is a consequence of superexchange and dipolar interactions. The employed approximation allows to demonstrate that dipolar coupling between atomic layers is responsible for the orientation of the magnetization when it differs from the one in a single layer. The ground state energy of a given NiO or MnO film is found to depend not only on the strain, but also on how much the interlayer separation and the 2D lattice constant are changed with respect to the ideal values corresponding to the non-distorted cubic structure. Nevertheless, it is shown that the orientation of the magnetization in the magnetic phase of any of these films is determined by the strain exclusively. A striped phase with the magnetization along the [112¯] direction appears as the ground state configuration of NiO and MnO ultrathin films. In films with equally oriented stripes along the layers this magnetic phase is twofold degenerate, while in films with multidomain layers it is eightfold degenerate. These results are not in contradiction with experimentally observed out-of-plane or in-plane magnetization of striped phases in NiO and MnO ultrathin films.