Interatomic interactions in metals

Abstract

A theory of the cohesive properties of metals is developed which, though inapplicable to transition, rare earth, and actinide metals, holds otherwise for arbitrary composition and structure. The theory is based on two ingredients, a new dielectric formulation of the many-body problem and the pseudo-potential method for dealing with the ion cores. When the exact energy is expanded in powers of the pseudo-potential and the dominant terms retained, there results an approximate formula for the cohesive energy explicitly containing pairwise central forces between the atoms. It is proved that these forces are neither ionic nor covalent but specifically metallic in character