The Fermi surfaces of Metallic Alloys and the Oscillatory Magnetic Coupling between Magnetic Layers separated by such Alloy Spacers

Abstract

We review the theory of oscillatory magnetic coupling in Metallic Multilayers across alloy spacers. We illustrate the relationship between the frequencies of the oscillations and the extremal caliper vectors of the Fermi surface of the spacer by explicit calculations for Cu$_{(1-x)}$Ni$_x$, Cr$_{(1-x)}$V$_x$ and Cr$_{(1-x)}$Mo$_x$ alloys. We argue the measurement of the frequencies of such oscillations can be an extremely useful and cheap probe of the Fermi surface of random alloys.