The effects of anisotropic relaxation times on the hall coefficients of some dilute alloys of silver

Abstract

A theory of the Hall effect in dilute alloys of a monovalent metal is developed, taking into account the effects of non-spherical energy surfaces and anisotropic relaxation times. The total relaxation time is assumed to be compounded of 0 thermal relaxation time which is anisotropic, and an impurity relaxation time which is isotropic. The wave number and the thermal relaxation time are expended in series of cubic harmonica up to that of order four, and the conductivity and Hall coefficient am calculated in terms of the coefficients in these series. The theory is applied to some measurements made by Dorfman and Zhukova (1939) on dilute alloys of palladium, platinum, cadmium, tin, and antimony in silver. with reasonable success, but in unable to explain similar measurements made by Onnes and Beckman (1912) on the silver-gold system. The results indicate that, if a relaxation time exists, it must be considerably anisotropic, in which case it in found that the Fermi surface in pure silver need not depart from sphericity sufficiently to touch the Brillouin zone boundary.