Effect of pressure on impurity-impurity interactions in dilute Au:Mn, Cu:Mn, and Au:Fe spin-glass alloys

Abstract
The electrical resistivity of the dilute spin-glass alloys Au-0.10-at.% Mn, 0.15-at.% Mn, 0.10-at.% Fe, 0.13-at.% Fe, and Cu-0.15-at.% Mn has been measured from 1.2 to 40 K at pressures to 100 kbar. In these alloys the cooperative "locking-in" of the impurity spins at a temperature T0 leads to a resistivity maximum at Tmax. Application of pressure is found to shift Tmax in a manner which is strongly system dependent: dTmaxdP>0 for Au:Mn, dTmaxdP0 for Cu:Mn, and dTmaxdP<0 for Au:Fe. These results are shown to be clearly incompatible with the widely held belief that kTmaxΔRKKY, where ΔRKKYcJ2S(S+1)EF is the average strength of the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interaction, and indicate that Tmax is a function of both ΔRKKY and TK, the Kondo temperature. This expectation is confirmed in a recent theory of Larsen who introduces an impurity-impurity interaction strength Δc into the parquet approximation of the Kondo resistivity and obtains an explicit expression for Tmax=Tmax(Δc,TK). It is shown that both the sign and the magnitude of dTmaxdP for the systems studied here are a natural consequence of both increasing TK and Δc in all systems and depend on the relative magnitudes of Δc and TK. In particular, one would expect to find dTmaxdP<0 in systems such as Au:Fe with relatively high Kondo temperatures. A further result of the analysis is that Δc(P)ΔR