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Publication
Physical Review Letters
Paper
Suppression of tunneling by interference in half-integer-spin particles
Abstract
Within a wide class of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems, quantum tunneling of magnetization direction is spin-parity dependent: it vanishes for magnetic particles with half-integer spin, but is allowed for integer spin. A coherent-state path-integral calculation shows that this topological effect results from interference between tunneling paths. © 1992 The American Physical Society.