Effects of transition-metal substitution in the iron-based superconductor LaFeAsO: Momentum- and real-space analysis from first principles

We study how transition-metal substitution changes the electronic structure of the iron-based superconductor LaFeAsO in real and momentum space. We first perform ab initio density functional calculation for various sizes of supercells with one transition-metal impurity. For various substitutes (Mn, Co, Ni, Zn, and Ru), we derive effective tight-binding models by constructing the maximally localized Wannier functions from the d bands around the Fermi level. The local electronic structure around the impurity site is quantitatively characterized by their onsite potential and transfer hoppings to neighboring sites. We find that the impurities are classified into three groups according to the derived parameters. For Mn, Co, and Ni, their impurity 3d levels measured from the Fe 3d level are ∼0.3, −0.3, and −0.8 eV, respectively, while, for the Zn case, its d level is extremely deep as ∼8 eV. For the Ru case, although the onsite-level difference is much smaller (∼O(0.1) eV), the transfer integrals around the impurity ion are larger than those of the pure system by 20% ∼ 30%, due to the large spatial spread of the Ru 4d orbitals. We also show that the charge distribution of the extra d electrons is confined around the impurity ion. We then unfold the first Brillouin zone (BZ) for the supercell to calculate the spectral function in the BZ for the normal cell for the case of Co and Ni doping. While the charge distribution seems to suggest that Co and Ni impurities do not change the amount of mobile carriers in the system, the momentum-space analysis clearly shows that the Fermi-surface volume indeed expands by Co and Ni substitutions, which can be well described by the rigid-band shift approximation.