7.

7 Zhnsition Metals and Alloys 401

course, also ~ ( E F ) are) derived from an LSDA total energy calculation.

In a ferromagnetic metal, I may appear as the average exchange split-
ting between spin-? and spin-$ bands, and at the same time, we find
I p ( 6 ~>) 1, and a reasonable value of msat. Thus we may speak about
a valid Stoner theory in the sense that it gives a consistent language in
which the gross features of the results of a full-scale LSDA calculations
can be described. However, we are not able to rederive these same re-
sults by postulating a simple lattice model, and using the mean field
a p p r o ~ i m a t i o nso
~ ~the
, Stoner theory is not valid in its original naive
sense. It is a future task to bridge the gap between these approaches.

Paramagnetic Susceptibility
The susceptibility of most metallic ferromagnets can be fitted to a
Curie-Weiss law in a temperature range above Tc. This allows to iden-
tify a high-temperature paramagnetic moment which is regarded as an
important measure of the degree of itinerancy of the magnetism. This
should be understood as follows: Let us assume that the ground state
saturation magnetization %at/hB can be ascribed to localized spins; us-
ing g = 2, this would require the fictitious (in general, fractional) spin
ST=O= psat/2. Assuming that the high-T paramagnetic susceptibility
corresponds to these localized spins, we get the estimate

(7.104)

As a matter of fact, the observed susceptibility often follows a Curie-

Weiss law, but with a different Curie constant

(7.105)

which allows us to measure the paramagnetic Bohr magneton number

PPaP The parameter ppar/psat is listed in Table 7.1. For localized spins,
it would have the value 1. However, for itinerant (band) ferromagnets,
40However,the overall features of an essentially exact solution for such models may
closely resemble the LSDA results, and may give an insight into the role of the shape
of p(c) (p. 458), and intraatomic exchange (p. 470).