Abstract
Recent experimental investigation of electronic and magnetic properties of thin films of bcc Ni grown on a $\mathrm{GaAs}(001)$ substrate allowed to extrapolate towards the magnetic properties of normally unstable bulk bcc Ni metal. Using first principles calculations, we find that due to the lattice mismatch Ni films on $\mathrm{GaAs}(001)$ are under tension and the resulting interlayer relaxation is at about 2.5%. The comparison of the calculated magnetic properties, including the effective interatomic Heisenberg exchange constants derived within the Oguchi-Lichtenstein formalism, for distorted and pure bcc phases of Ni allow to draw a conclusion about the relevance of the experimentally extrapolated properties of pure bcc Ni. We show that a lattice distortion does not alter the values of the magnetic moments significantly, but only moderately influences the effective magnetic exchange interactions as compared to undistorted bulk. We advocate, however, that the experimentally estimated value of the bulk cubic magnetic anisotropy should be taken with precaution, since the omitted contribution due to shear strain may be significant. In addition we discuss the possible existence of weak itinerant ferromagnetism in bcc Ni films prepared under compression.
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