Temperature Dependence of Transport Coefficients in Liquid and Amorphous Metals

Abstract

We apply the muffin-tin effective medium approximation to calculate the temperature dependence of the resistivity and of the thermopower of amorphous and liquid metals. The results show unambiguously that a large resistivity is accompanied by a negative temperature coefficient, in agreement with the experimental situation. This behavior is shown to result from a pseudo-gap which opens in the 1-particle spectrum due to strong scattering at the quasi zone boundary. In turn the thermopower is found to have non-trivial density and temperature dependences.