Effects of spin-dependent quasiparticle renormalization in Fe, Co, and Ni photoemission spectra: An experimental and theoretical study

We have investigated the spin-dependent quasiparticle lifetimes and the strength of electron correlation effects in the ferromagnetic 3d transition metals Fe, Co, and Ni by means of spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. The experimental data are accompanied by state-of-the-art many-body calculations within the dynamical mean-field theory and the three-body scattering approximation, including fully relativistic calculations of the photoemission process within the one-step model. Our quantitative analysis reveals that inclusion of local many-body Coulomb interactions are of ultimate importance for a realistic description of correlation effects in ferromagnetic 3d transition metals. However, we found that more sophisticated many-body calculations with larger modifications in the case of Fe and Co are still needed to improve the quantitative agreement between experiment and theory. In general, it turned out that not only the dispersion behavior of energetic structures should be affected by nonlocal correlations but also the line widths of most of the photoemission peaks are underestimated by the current theoretical approaches. The increasing values of the on-site Coulomb interaction parameter U and the band narrowing of majority spin states obtained when moving from Fe to Ni indicate that the effect of nonlocal correlations becomes weaker with increasing atomic number, whereas correlation effects tend to be stronger.