Extremely long-lived magnetic excitations in supported Fe chains

Abstract

We report on a theoretical study of the lifetime of the first excited state of spin chains made of an odd number of Fe atoms on Cu2N/Cu(100). Yan, Choi, Burgess, Rolf-Pissarczyk, and Loth [Nat. Nanotech. 10, 40 (2015)] recently observed very long lifetimes in the case of Fe3 chains. We consider the decay of the first excited state induced by electron-hole pair creation in the substrate. For a finite magnetic field, the two lowest-lying states in the chain have a quasi-Néel state structure. Decay from one state to the other strongly depends on the degree of entanglement of the local spins in the chain. The weak entanglement in the chain accounts for the long lifetimes that increase exponentially with chain length. Despite their apparently very different properties, the behavior of odd and even chains is governed by the same kind of phenomena, in particular entanglement effects. The present results account quite well for the lifetimes recently measured by Yan et al. on Fe3.