Theory of substitutional alloys of intermediate valence systems: Concentration and temperature dependence of the static magnetic susceptibility

Abstract

The effect of alloying in intermediate valence compounds is studied within an extended version of the Anderson model which takes into account substitutional disorder of the rare earth ions. In particular, we concentrate on modifications of the conduction band, describe them by an effective shift in the Fermi energy, and consider its influence on the mixed valence behaviour. By applying the alloy analog approximation to the manyparticle Hamiltonian describing the local magnetic 4f shells, the complete effective Hamiltonian is that of a ternary alloy. This problem is solved within the coherent potential approximation and the static magnetic susceptibility is calculated as a function of temperature and disorder. Depending on the shift of the Fermi energy with respect to the 4f levels, qualitatively different behaviour is obtained which corresponds very well with magnetic measurements on different Yb alloys. The model yields an inverse proportionality between the susceptibility atT=0 and the temperatureT M of the susceptibility maximum as functions of the disorder.