A Note on the Electronic States in Liquid Metals

Abstract

525The energy spectrum of valence electrons in liquid metals is investigated with the nearlyfree-electron approximation (Ziman's picture). The spectrum in monovalent (alkali) liquid metals is essentially the free one with small increase of the density of states on the Fermi surface. In the case of polyvalent metals, the spectrum is distorted by the electron-ion interaction reflecting complicated ionic distribution. The density of states near the Fermi surface increases by a factor of about two compared to that of free electrons. The energy spectrum seems to characterize a liquid metal from others to some extent as it does a solid. Qualitative feature of several electronic properties is discussed in relation to the ionic density correlation, i.e. the structure factor of neutron diffraction of a liquid metal. Several experimental facts for the electronic structure in liquid metals, e.g. the soft X-ray emission spectrum from liquid aluminium, which are thought to be incompatible with Ziman's picture, are explained reasonq_bly from the viewpoint of nearly-free-electron approximation.The dynamical effect of the electron-ion interaction is investigated in reference to Ziman's plasma term scattering. The effect is shown to cause a mass shift for thermal properties of electrons and in the case of liquid sodium the mass shift is expected to amount to the same order as in the solid. investigate the applicability of the Kohn-Rostoker method to the electronic states in a liquid metal recently. The method may be powerful for the cases of the strong electron-ion interaction.at Florida International University on June 19, 2015 http://ptp.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from *) Strictly speakiU:g, the detectable quantity from the spin paramagnetism is the naive density of states, determined solely from (dE(k)/dk)-1, that is, the expression (6) but without the renormalization factor Z(k). The distortion of (dE(k)/dk)-1 near the Fermi surface, however, amounts to the same order as that of N(E) in Fig. 4. at Florida International University on June 19, 2015 http://ptp.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from *l The expression (9) is quite general as long as we take the second order approximation with a simplified electron-ion interaction, and may apply to several problems with slight modification.

Electrical Transport and Electronic Structure Calculation of Al-Ga Binary Alloys

“…There are a number of theoretical methods of determining different aspects of the electronic structure of liquid metals among which the density of states and the Fermi energy have significant bearing. The calculations of the Fermi energy E F and the density of states N (E F ) for simple liquid metals have been reported by [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] using various pseudopotentials and the Green function theory. It does not appear that the Harrison first principle pseudopotential has been used for the study of these properties except by Thakur [52] for alkali metals.…”

Optical conductivity in the impurity band of doped semiconductors

“…Sij in the MT and IY theories. The electron density of states, N ( E ) , is then determined not only by t,he local average Green function, znn, but there is also a contribution from the nonlocal part, Grim, namely it was shown by Roth[6], that It should be mentioned here, that there is another way of including the overlap integral into Green function calculations. This method has been presented byMajlis and …”