Magnetic and orbital instabilities in a lattice of SU(4) organometallic Kondo complexes

Abstract

Motivated by experiments of scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) on self-assembled networks of iron(II)-phtalocyanine (FePc) molecules deposited on a clean Au(111) surface [FePc/Au(111)] and its explanation in terms of the extension of the impurity SU(4) Anderson model to the lattice in the Kondo regime, we study the competition between the Kondo effect and the magneto-orbital interactions occurring in FePc/Au(111). We explore the quantum phases and critical points of the model using a large-$N$ slave-boson method in the mean-field approximation. The SU(4) symmetry in the impurity appears as a combination of the usual spin and an orbital pseudospin arising from the degenerate $3d_{xz}$ and $3d_{yz}$ orbitals in the Fe atom. In the case of the lattice, our results show that the additional orbital degrees of freedom crucially modify the low-temperature phase diagram, and induce new types of orbital interactions among the Fe atoms, which can potentially stabilize exotic quantum phases with magnetic and orbital order. The dominant instability corresponds to spin ferromagnetic and orbital antiferromagnetic order.