388 Ch.

7 Itinerant Electron Magnetism

in more detail later. a-Mn is an antiferromagnet below TN = 95K but

a horrendously complicated one: even the non-magnetic cubic unit cell
contains 58 atoms. Fe, Co, and Ni are ferromagnetic metals, to which
we return in Sec. 7.7.4. Neither of the 4d or 5d TM elements orders
magnetically but Pd comes close to it.

The alloys of T M with each other, and with other elements, show
a tremendous variety of behaviour [442]which we cannot endevour to
review here. For illustrating various points, we will mention ZrZnz, the
YCo2 system, and some of the TM silicides.
When describing the experimental findings, or the results of elec-
tronic structure calculations, we will be using the language we developed
in the mean field treatment of the simplest33, one-band Hubbard model:
Stoner criterion, spin density waves, etc. We do so in the hope that these
concepts turn out to be applicable also to more complicated models, in-
cluding such that will, eventually, be accepted as useful models of Fe,
Cr, Lal&3rzMn03, etc. To proceed in this spirit presupposes that the
mean field results are not grossly misleading, i.e., that the mean field be-
haviour is qualitatively the same as the exact one. Here lies a difficulty
which, at the time of writing, presents one of the outstanding problems
of many-body theory: the status of ferromagnetism. It appears that
while the mean field description of two-sublattice antiferromagnetism
and of the (in general, incommensurate) spin density wave state is in
qualitative agreement with the expected exact results, the prediction of
an essentially structure-insensitive, intermediate- U ferromagnetic phase
is an artefact of the mean field approximation. This is merely to say
that well-developed itinerant ferromagnetism does not seem to be a
generic feature of the Hubbard model. It is perfectly possible that a
well-chosen specific Hubbard model, or some more sophisticated lattice
fermion model, will provide a satisfactory understanding of the phe-
nomenon of itinerant ferromagnetism. We discuss this question briefly
at the end of the next section, and in more detail in Ch. 8.

33Meaningthe nearest-neighbour hopping model on a hypercubic lattice.