Electronic and magnetothermal properties of ferromagnetic clusters Original Research Article

The electronic structures and the magnetothermal properties of nickel clusters have been investigated. Their effective magnetic moments and specific heat capacities have been calculated assuming that the clusters undergo superparamagnetic relaxation. The average magnetic moments are computed adopting Friedelʹs model of ferromagnetic clusters. The surface effect and the cluster size effect on the thermodynamic properties of these clusters have been analysed based on the mean field theory approximation. The specific heat capacity of Ni clusters for N=300, where N is the number of atoms in the cluster, shows the peak value at T=550 K and exhibits a steady increase with N. The effective potentials and energy eigen values of the clusters as a function of the number of atoms and radius of the cluster have also been calculated self-consistently using the local density approximation (LDA) of the density functional theory (DFT); this has been performed within the framework of the spherical jellium background model (SJBM). The results of this study have been compared with the Stern–Gerlach experimental data and other theoretical results already reported in literature