Abstract
A study is made of the effects of a nonspherical and multiply connected Fermi surface on the properties of the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida sd interaction between localized spins and the conduction electrons. At a critical value of the conduction-electron concentration N¯e, the Fermi surface touches a number of Brillouin-zone faces, giving rise to a number of necks as in copper and nickel. It is shown that, in this region of electron concentration, the paramagnetic Curie temperature θ exhibits a kink associated with a discontinuity in the exchange-stiffness parameter DΣR2J(R), where J(R) is the indirect-exchange parameter. These effects are expected to be more pronounced in materials with a large number of necks in the multiply connected Fermi surface. We choose the simplest possible model consistent with the crystal symmetry and the Bragg condition at the Brillouin-zone faces, i.e., a tight-binding approximation for the conduction electrons; but a number of results may be shown to be model-independent. We also neglect interband transitions, but these are shown not to affect the long-range component of the conduction-electron polarization. The long-range effects are shown to be model-independent because they are related only to the level-density function ρ(ε) and its derivatives at the Fermi level, whereas the short-range effects are shown to be sensitive to the details of the band structure. The paramagnetic temperature θ can be separated into a model-independent term related to ρ(εF) and a model-dependent term related to short-range effects. In the region corresponding to the spherical Fermi surface, θ is nearly proportional to N¯e13, and the model-dependent contribution to θ is relatively small, at least for the simple cubic structure. It is also shown that the exchange moments R2ΣR R2J(R) and R4ΣR R4J(R) are model-independent and related to the level-density function ρ(ε) and its first and second derivatives at the Fermi level. In the neighborhood of the critical concentration, relatively large positive values of R4(a2R2) can be obtained for the simple cubic case, in contrast to the negative values of R4R2 obtained by Kasuya in the limit kFa0.