Variational thermodynamic calculations for some liquid sd metals

Abstract

A tractable and reliable expression for the one valence-electron eigenenergies, required in calculating the total energy of a disordered sd-type metal, is formulated in the context of the model-potential theory. With the aid of this expression, the variational calculation of the Helmholtz free energy using the hard-sphere model as a reference system, as employed in ab initio calculations of the thermodynamic properties for the nearly-free-electron-like (NFE) liquid metals, can now be extended with reasonable accuracy to those liquid sd metals in which the d-like valence-electron states below the Fermi level are not very localized. Also, the ab initio-type pseudopotential calculation of the interionic pair potentials, as carried out for the NFE-like metals in the literature, is made practical for these sd metals in their disordered states.