English

Correlation-enhanced Friedel oscillations in amorphous and quasicrystalline metals

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2008-02-03 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

The exponentially strong damping of the conventional Friedel oscillations at elevated temperature T as well as due to disorder poses a severe problem to the Hume-Rothery (HR) stabilization mechanism of amorphous and quasicrystalline alloys. We show that quantum correlations induced by electron-electron interactions in the presence of random impurity scattering can play an important role in stabilizing these systems: When there is strong backscattering off local ion clusters, the static electron density response chi(0,q) acquires a powerlaw divergence at q=2k_F even at T>0. This Fermi surface singularity leads to an enhancement as well as to a systematical phase shift of the Friedel oscillations, consistent with experiments. In addition, the spatial decay exponent is reduced, strongly supporting the validity of a HR-like mechanism at T>0. This effect may be accounted for in pseudopotential calculations through the local field factor.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9707295,
  title  = {Correlation-enhanced Friedel oscillations in amorphous and quasicrystalline metals},
  author = {Johann Kroha},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9707295},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

5 pages, LaTex, World Scientific book style (style file included), 3 Postscript figures included, to appear in Proceedings of the Int. Conf. Aperiodic'97 (Aug.97)