Is. Tupitsyn et al., EFFECTIVE HAMILTONIAN IN THE PROBLEM OF A CENTRAL SPIN-COUPLED TO A SPIN ENVIRONMENT, International journal of modern physics b, 11(24), 1997, pp. 2901-2926
We consider here the problem of a ''giant spin'', with spin quantum nu
mber S much greater than 1, interacting with a set of microscopic spin
s. Interactions between the microscopic spins are ignored. This model
describes the low-energy properties of magnetic grains or magnetic mac
romolecules (ferromagnetically or antiferromagnetically ordered) inter
acting with a surrounding spin environment, such as nuclear spins. Our
aim is to give a general method for truncating the model to another o
ne, valid at low energies, in which a two-level system interacts with
the environmental spins, and higher energy terms are absorbed into a n
ew set of couplings. This is done using an instanton technique. We the
n study the accuracy of this technique, by comparing the results for t
he low energy effective Hamiltonian, with results derived for the orig
inal giant spin, coupled to a macroscopic spin, using exact diagonaliz
ation techniques. We find that the low energy central spin effective H
amiltonian gives very accurate results (with increasing accuracy for l
arge S), provided the typical coupling energies between the giant spin
and the microscopic spins are not too large, and provided temperature
and external field are sufficiently low. The essential limitation to
the applicability of the low-energy effective Hamiltonian is just the
semiclassical WKB approximation itself, which inevitably fails for ver
y small S. Our results thus justify previous use of this effective Ham
iltonian in calculations of the effects of nuclear spins on the dynami
cs of nanomagnetic systems.