On the Screened Field around an Impurity Atom in Metal

Abstract

By using a newly proposed model, in which the positive charges of bare nuclei of an impurity atom and the matrix atoms are put at the lattice points and all the electrons, valence electrons as well as core ones, are treated by Thomas-Fermi method, the deviation of the potential from the periodic one for the pure matrix metal due to the presence of an impurity atom has been calculated and compared with the screened Coulomb potential obtained in previous papers.
In the case of pure metals, a similar treatment was made by Slater and Krutter, so that our model may be regarded as an extension of theirs to the case of substitutional impurity.
Our obtained potential is nearly proportional to ΔZ, where ΔZ=Z_i–Z, Z_i and Z being atomic numbers of the impurity and the matrix atom respectively and in this paper, we have treated the cases of ΔZ=±2 and ±1.