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Orbital spin-splitting factors for conduction electrons in lead

University of British Columbia

A detailed experimental study has been made of the spin-splitting factors ℊc for magnetic Landau levels associated with conduction electrons in extremal orbits on the Fermi surface of lead. This information has been derived from the waveform of the de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) quantum oscillations in the magnetization of single-crystal lead spheres at temperatures of about 1.2 K and with applied magnetic fields in the range 50-75 kG. A commercial spectrum analyzer has been used to provide on-line values of the harmonic amplitudes in the dHvA waveform, and the values of ℊc have been extracted from the relative strengths of the harmonics. Serious systematic errors in ℊc can arise on account of waveform distortions caused by the small and subtle difference between the externally applied field H and the magnetizing field B acting on the conduction electrons. In 1981 Gold and Van Schyndel demonstrated that these 'magnetic-interaction' distortions could be suppressed to a large extent by using negative magnetic feedback to make the induction B within the sample be the same as H (or very nearly so). This thesis describes the first in-depth application of the magnetic-feedback technique to the systematic study of any metal. Particular attention has been paid to the effect of sample inhomogeneity, and Shoenberg's treatment of the magnetic interaction in a non-uniform sample has been generalized to include magnetic feedback. This theory accounts well for many features in the experimental data, especially those which remained a puzzle in the earlier work of Gold and Van Schyndel. Experimental ℊc values are given for the first time for most of the extremal orbits on the lead Fermi surface and for high-symmetry directions of the magnetic field. Indeed these are the most detailed data reported for any polyvalent metal. The ℊc factors for the different orbits and field directions are found to span the range from 0.56 to 1.147. These large net deviations from the free-electron value ℊ₀ = 2.0023 are consequences of the strong spin-orbit and electron-phonon interactions, and an attempt has been made to separate these two contributions to the ℊ-shifts.

Text

2010-06-23

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25961

Physics

University of British Columbia

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