Cr monolayer on vicinal Pd surfaces

We report a study of the magnetic behavior of Cr monolayer deposited on a Pd stepped substrate using a real space tight-binding approach. The magnetism is described in the Hartree–Fock approximation of the Hubbard Hamiltonian. The density of states is calculated within the recursion technique. Multiple magnetic configurations are obtained for the following vicinal surfaces: (1 0 1), (1 0 3), (1 0 5), (1 0 7), and (1 0 9). Ferrimagnetic configurations are always found for the ground state with sizeable magnetic moments on the Cr sites for all the considered surfaces. But because the module of the Cr magnetic moments are not equal a resulting magnetization remains present and this should differentiate drastically with the “perfect” c(2×2) magnetic configuration on Pd(0 0 1) in which the mean magnetic moment is zero so that neither X-ray magnetic circular dichroism nor surface magneto-optical Kerr effect will detect anything! This behavior is in contradiction with the expected topological antiferromagnetism.