402 Ch.

7 Itinerant Electron Magnetism

the saturation moment arises from the different partial occupations of

the exchange-split spin-? and spin-J. bands. In the simplest mean field
treatment, the exchange splitting vanishes for T > Tc, so we have no
right to expect that psat has any relevance for the paramagnetic suscep-
tibility. Thus it should come as a surprise that for iron, ppar/psat 1, in-
N

dicating that the magnetic moments are “almost localized”, and survive
essentially intact into the disordered phase. This is a local correlation
effect, completely beyond the scope of the simple Stoner theory. Let us
note, however, that there exists a finite-T version of LSDA which gives
a fairly accurate description of paramagnetic iron [374]. The same the-
ory predicts that Ni is a much more itinerant (essentially Stoner-type)
ferromagnet .
For other substances ppar/p,at exceeds 1 the more, the more itinerant

-
the nature of the ferromagnetic state is. A large value of ppar/psat
(ranging up to 15 for some iron-cobalt silicides) is typically associated
with a low psat, and a low Tc. As we noted before, the important
subject of apparent local moment behaviour in the paramagnetic phase
of metallic ferromagnets lies beyond the scope of the present text.

7.7.5 Chromium
At TN = 311K, structurally perfect41, single-crystal Cr samples undergo
a phase transition into an incommensurate, linearly polarized spin den-
sity wave state. An extensive review of the properties of this fascinating
system is given in [103]. We learn on the example of Cr, what kind of
behaviour is expected if the SDW does not open a gap over the entire
Fermi surface, thus the system remains metallic below TN.
Paramagnetic Cr has the bcc structure. It would be easy to envisage
a two-sublattice antiferromagnetic structure, with the moments of the
corner site atoms of the cubic unit cells pointing antiparallel to those of
the center sites. This structure could be described as alternating from
plane to plane, as we proceed along (say) the z-axis, thus it would have
41The sensitive dependence of the magnetic order on the mechanical quality of
the sample was the source of a long-standing difficulty in understanding the na-
ture of Cr. Cold-worked polycrystalline samples show a transition into a different,
commensurate magnetic phase around 475K, providing an example of “technical an-
tiferromagnetism” [103].