Coulomb correlation effects in the quasiparticle band structure of ferromagnetic rare-earth insulators

Abstract

We present a method for calculating the temperature dependence of the electronic quasiparticle density of states (QDOS) of a ferromagnetic rare-earth insulator like EuO. Special attention is devoted to how the ‘‘localized’’ ferromagnetism manifests itself in x-ray photoemission and bremsstrahlung isochromat spectra. Our study includes the first six conduction bands of EuO (the first five are Eu 5d like, the sixth is mainly of Eu 6s character) as well as the rather flat 4f levels. The starting point is an extended d-f exchange model, the main parts of which are an exchange interaction between 4f moments and conduction electrons, a Coulomb repulsion between highly correlated 4f electrons, and a hybridization of 4f with conduction-band states. We use an exact T=0 relationship between spin-up quasiparticle energies and one-electron Bloch energies ${\varepsilon }_m$(k) for an optimal determination of the latter by performing a self-consistent, spin-polarized band-structure calculation based on density-functional theory. For finite temperatures the model is approximately solved by a many-body procedure. The QDOS exhibits a striking temperature dependence mainly due to the d-f exchange. Two 4f-like peaks appear in the spin-polarized QDOS, the low-energy one being occupied, the high-energy one being empty. The temperature dependence of the localized ferromagnetism appears in the QDOS as a temperature-dependent shift of spectral weight between the low- and the high-energy peak.