Magnetic anisotropy in thin films of transition metals

We calculate the magnetic anisotropy and the orbital magnetic moment of Fe, Co, and Ni thin films and their dependence on the number of layers. We use a tight-binding Hubbard Hamiltonian solved in the unrestricted Hartree-Fock approximation to obtain the bandstructure. Once selfconsistency is achieved we perform one further diagonalization including the spin-orbit interaction term. By changing the spin quantization axis we obtain the band energy and the magnetic moment for different configurations. We analize the effect of the spin-orbit coupling on the band structure and its relationship with the magnetic anisotropy energy.