Interaction between localized moments in dilute alloys: Correlation effects

The effect of including dynamical correlations between electrons of opposite spins in determining the ground state energy of a pair of magnetically interacting impurity atoms in an otherwise normal metal is discussed. It is found that in the ground state of such a system the spins of the magnetic impurity atoms are aligned antiparallel. In other words, the interaction between the localized states is of antiferromagnetic exchange type. This result differs sharply from that predicted by the Hartree-Fock (H-F) theory, in which the ground state of the system can be either ferro- or antiferromagnetic, depending on the energies of the spin up and spin down electrons relative to the Fermi energy. The calculations are performed using many-body Green's function techniques in thet-matrix approximation.