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Image of helical local moment magnetic order in the STM spectrum

Alireza Akbari1 and Peter Thalmeier2,*

  • *Contact author: peter.thalmeier@cpfs.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. B 111, 245129 – Published 12 June, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/gp2r-kzf3

Abstract

The surface tunneling microscope (STM) method probes the conduction electron spectrum which is influenced by the presence of collective order parameters. It may, in fact, be used as a tool to obtain important information about their microscopic nature, for example, the gap symmetry in unconventional superconductors. Surprisingly, it has been found that the STM spectrum can also identify magnetic order of completely localized electrons e.g., an incommensurate helical structure of 4f electron moments, as observed in the compound GdRu2Si2. This is due to the fact that the exchange coupling of conduction states to the localized subsystem reconstructs the conduction bands which then leaves an imprint on the STM spectrum. First, we develop a theory based on this idea that shows the appearance of STM satellite peaks at the wave vector of localized moment helical order for the pure surface. Second, we derive the quasiparticle interference spectrum in the Born approximation due to the presence of surface impurities which contain information on the reconstruction process of itinerant states caused by the localized helical order. Furthermore, we show that within the full T matrix approach, impurity bound states are also influenced by the exchange coupling to helical magnetic order.

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Phys. Rev. B 111, 245129– Published 12 June, 2025
  • Received 18 March 2025
  • Revised 14 May 2025
  • Accepted 29 May 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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