Man-made materials—an exciting area for hyperfine-interaction investigations

Abstract

Man-made low-dimensional magnetic systems including surfaces, interfaces and multilayers, have attracted a great amount of attention in the past decade because, as expected, the lowered symmetry and coordination number offer a variety of opportunities for inducing new and exotic phenomena and so hold out the promise of new device applications. Local spin density functional (LSDF) ab initio electronic-structure calculations employing the full-potential-linearized augmented-plane-wave (FLAPW) method have played a key role in the development of this exciting field by not only providing a clearer understanding of the experimental observations but also predicting new systems with desired properties. One of the striking successes of theory in the last decade has been the calculation of hyperfine fields at surfaces and interfaces. Concurrently, several groups have followed the pioneering work of Korecki and Gradmann and have measured hyperfine fields at surfaces and interfaces. In this paper, we review new features of hyperfine-interaction investigations in man-made materials which emphasizes how the close interplay of theoretical determinations and experiment are essential because the hyperfine field is not proportional to the magnetization and so interpretations of experiment are totally dependent on theory.