Many-body Green's function theory for thin ferromagnetic anisotropic Heisenberg films: treatment of the exchange anisotropy

The many-body Green's function theory developed in our previous work for treating the reorientation of the magnetization of thin ferromagnetic films is extended to include the exchange anisotropy. This leads to additional momentum dependencies which require some non-trivial changes in the formalism. The theory is developed for arbitrary spin values S and for multilayers. The effects of the exchange anisotropy and the single-ion anisotropy, which was treated in our earlier work, on the magnetic properties of thin ferromagnetic films are compared. Received 31 October 2002 Published online 7 May 2003