Electronic structure and magnetism of metastable bcc Co(001)

The electronic structure and magnetism of thin films of metastable bcc phase Co(001) consisting of one-, five- and nine-layers is determined by means of all-electron local spin density full potential linearized augmented plane wave (FLAPW) calculations at the lattice constant found for bcc Co stabilized on a GaAs substrate by Prinz. Band structure, surface states, density of states, charge and spin densities and contact hyperfine fields are presented. The center layer of the many-layer films yields a spin magnetic moment of 1.76μ_B which agrees well with results of bulk calculations for bcc Co. The surface layer has a moment (1.94μ_B) which is only 10% greater than the bulk value - in sharp contrast to the enhancement found for other transition metal surfaces [35% for Fe(001), 20% for Ni(001) and over 300% for Cr(001)]. Unlike these other transition metal surfaces, even the first layer below the surface layer in Co has the bulk magnetic moment - which indicates that the spin density, like the charge density, shows very short range screening of the surface-vacuum interface.