Calculations of the electron-phonon interaction in the transition metals V, Nb, and Ta

Abstract

Abstract We have calculated the electron-phonon interaction parameter λ for V, Nb, and Ta making use of our self-consistent APW band structure calculations and the measured phonon spectra. The calculations have been performed within the framework of the theory of Gaspari and Gyorffy. Our results show that within the standard APW muffin tin approximation the theory yields values for λ that are a factor of 1.5 to 2.0 greater than the measured values. In this paper we propose a simple method for including certain non-muffin tin effects into the calculation of λ. This improvement to the theory reduces the differences between calculated and measured values of λ to 10%.