مجله پژوهش فیزیک ایران
سال هشتم شماره 2 (تابستان 1387)

In this paper after introduction of manganites, we have studied the effect of particle size and doping on structural, magnetic and magnetoresistance of LSMO manganite samples. The magnetoresistance measurements show that, by decreasing the particle size LFMR increases. Also the results show that the LFMR increases at low doping levels and decreases at high doping levels. The spin dependent tunneling and scattering at the grain boundaries is the origin of increasing the LFMR at low doping levels. Also the substitution of impurity ions at Mn sites and subsequently weaking of double exchange is responsible for decreasing of LFMR at high doping level.

Electric field gradients (EFG’s) at the In sites and spin magnetic moments at the Ce sites were calculated for the case of solid CeIn3. The calculations were performed by increasing pressure gradually from -5 to +22 GPa within the density functional theory (DFT) using the augmented plane waves plus local orbital (APW+lo) method employing the well-known PBE-GGA+U and WC-GGA+U schemes. The results almost show a linear reduction of spin magnetic moments of Ce by gradually increasing the pressure from -5 GPa to 22 GPa. However, from our results one can see that the calculated electric field gradients at the In site are growing up by increasing the pressure. We have compared the EFG’s at zero pressure with experimental and theoretical results of the others. The comparison shows that at ambient pressure our EFG’s are more consistent with experiment than the results of the other groups. Our result shows that the calculated spin magnetic moments are suppressed in the vicinity of some quantum critical point.

We give an overview of recent work on charge degrees of freedom of strongly correlated electrons on geometrically frustrated lattices. Special attention is paid to the checkerboard lattice, i.e., the two-dimensional version of a pyrochlore lattice and to the kagomé lattice. For the checkerboard lattice it is shown that at half filling when spin degrees of freedom are neglected and at quarter filling when they are included excitations with fractional charges ±e/2 may exist. The same holds true for the three-dimensional pyrochlore lattice. In the former case the fractional charges are confined. The origin of the weak, constant confining force is discussed and some similarities to quarks and to string theory are pointed out. For the checkerboard lattice a formulation in terms of a compact U(1) gauge theory is described. Furthermore a new kinetic mechanism for ferromagnetism at special fillings of a kagomé lattice is discussed.

Quantum phases and fluctuations in correlated electron systems with frustration and competing interactions are reviewed. In the localized moment case the S=1/2 J1 - J2 - model on a square lattice exhibits a rich phase diagram with magnetic as well as exotic hidden order phases due to the interplay of frustration and quantum fluctuations. Their signature in magnetocaloric quantities and the high field magnetization are surveyed. The possible quantum phase transitions are discussed and applied to layered vanadium oxides. In itinerant electron systems frustration is an emergent property caused by electron correlations. It leads to enhanced spin fluctuations in a very large region of momentum space and therefore may cause heavy fermion type low temperature anomalies as in the 3d spinel compound LiV2O4. Competing on-site and inter-site electronic interactions in Kondo compounds are responsible for the quantum phase transition between nonmagnetic Kondo singlet phase and magnetic phase such as observed in many 4f compounds. They may be described by Kondo lattice and simplified Kondo necklace type models. Their quantum phase transitions are investigated by numerical exact diagonalization and analytical bond operator methods respectively.

The fermion sign problem is studied in the path integral formalism. The standard picture of Fermi liquids is first critically analyzed, pointing out some of its rather peculiar properties. The insightful work of Ceperley in constructing fermionic path integrals in terms of constrained world-lines is then reviewed. In this representation, the minus signs associated with Fermi-Dirac statistics are self consistently translated into a geometrical constraint structure (the nodal hypersurface) acting on an effective bosonic dynamics. As an illustrative example we use this formalism to study 1+1-dimensional systems, where statistics are irrelevant, and hence the sign problem can be circumvented. In this low-dimensional example, the structure of the nodal constraints leads to a lucid picture of the entropic interaction essential to one-dimensional physics. Working with the path integral in momentum space, we then show that the Fermi gas can be understood by analogy to a Mott insulator in a harmonic trap. Going back to real space, we discuss the topological properties of the nodal cells, and suggest a new holographic conjecture relating Fermi liquids in higher dimensions to soft-core bosons in one dimension. We also discuss some possible connections between mixed Bose/Fermi systems and supersymmtery.

Using a combination of electronic-structure and many-body calculations, we investigate correlations effects in the halfmetallic ferromagnet NiMnSb. A realistic many-body Hamiltonian, containing only Mn-d orbitals shows the importance of non-quasiparticle states just above the Fermi level. Our results suggest that for a better description of low energy states around Fermi level, Ni-d orbitals should be explicitly included.

We present and compare the magnetic structures of limit compounds, between the ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism in the pseudobinary compounds of type RNi/Pt/Cu, where R = Tb, Gd, Nd or Ce, appearing when we substitute the transition metal. All of them are examples of complex magnetic structures as the result of different magnetic interactions, inhomogeneities and disorder. This overview provides us a fruitful field of discussion considering the competition of magnetic interactions in a context of disorder. We discuss the similarities and differences between the structures and we conclude about the importance of the disorder in the existence of several phenomena in magnetism, which could lead to new insights in the stability of magnetic phases, as clusters glass or short range interactions in the mesoscopic scale.

We study the transport of electrons in a graphene NSN structure in which two normal regions are connected by a superconducting strip of thickness d. Within Dirac-Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations we describe the transmission through the contact in terms of different scattering processes consisting of quasiparticle cotunneling, local and crossed Andreev reflections. Compared to a fully normal structure we show that the angular dependence of the transmission probability is significantly modified by the presence of superconducting correlations. This modifation can be explained in terms of the interplay between Andreev reflection and Klein tunneling of chiral quasiparticles. We further analyze the energy dependence of the resulting differential conductance of the structure. The subgap differential conductance shows features of Andreev reflection and cotunelling processes, which tends to the values of an NS structure for large ds. Above the gap, the differential conductance shows an oscillatory behavior with energy even at very large ds.

This review article is about the role of electron-electron interactions in low dimensional systems and its transport properties in nano-structures. It begins with a review of the pair-distribution function theory of electron liquid systems taking into account the electron-electron interactions. We extend the theory for highly correlated system such two- and one-dimensional electron liquids. We then review the microscopic theory of the local-field factors and calculate the quasiparticle properties in two-dimension electron liquid and compare our results with those measured by recent experiments. The physics of two-dimension bilayer structures are revised and are immediately applied to the study of charged Coulomb drag effects in a bilayer electron-electron system and results are compared with experimental data. As a final application, the Luttinger theory is discussed and we compare our recent calculations with those obtained from quantum Monte Carlo simulation for one dimensional electron liquid.

Hubbard model is an important model in the theory of strongly correlated electron systems. In this contribution we introduce this model and the concepts of electron correlation by building on a tight binding model. After enumerating various methods of tackling the Hubbard model, we introduce the numerical method of exact diagonalization in detail. The book keeping and practical implementation aspects are illustrated with analytically solvable example of two-site Hubbard model.

This manuscript is the collection of lectures given in the summer school on strongly correlated electron systems held at Isfahan university of technology, June 2007. A short overview on quantum magnetism and spin systems is presented. The numerical exact diagonalization (Lanczos) alghorithm is explained in a pedagogical ground. This is a method to get some ground state properties on finite cluster of lattice models. Two extensions of Lanczos method to get the excited states and also finite temperature properties of quantum models are also explained. The basic notions of quantum phase transition is discussed in term of Ising model in transverse field. Its phase diagram and critical properties are explained using the quantum renormalization group approach. Most of the topics are in tutorial level with hints to recent research activities

We study the Mott transition in the two dimensional Hubbard model by using the variational cluster approximation. The transition potential obtained is roughly Uc ≈ 2 and 6 for square and triangular lattices, respectively. A comparison between results of this approximation and other quantum cluster methods is presented. Our zero-temperature calculation at strong coupling show that the transition on the triangular and square lattices occur at lower values of compared with other numerical techniques such as DMFT, CDMFT, and DCA. We also study the thermodynamic limit by an extrapolation to infinite size.