A study of the electronic properties of liquid alkali metals. A self--consistent approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates the electronic properties of liquid alkali metals and alloys using a self-consistent perturbation approach, providing insights into their density of states, conductivity, and thermopower with varying agreement to experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent second order RPE method combined with pseudopotentials and correlation functions to analyze liquid alkali metals and alloys.

Findings

Good agreement with experiments for Na, K, Rb, and Na-K alloys.

Less satisfactory agreement for Li, Cs, and Li-Na alloys.

Provides detailed electronic property calculations for nearly-free-electron liquids.

Abstract

We study the electronic properties (density of states, conductivity and thermopower) of some nearly--free--electron systems: the liquid alkali metals and two liquid alloys, Li-Na and Na-K. The study has been performed within the self-consistent second order Renormalized Propagator Perturbation Expansion (RPE) for the self-energy. The input ionic pseudopotentials and static correlation functions are derived from the neutral pseudoatom method and the modified hypernetted chain theory of liquids, respectively. Reasonable agreement with experiment is found for Na, K, Rb and Na-K, whereas for Li and Cs and Li-Na the agreement is less satisfactory