Recent advances of itinerant-electron metamagnetism and related properties of intermetallic compounds

A review is presented on the recent advances of itinerant-electron metamagnetism (IEM). By taking into account the magneto-volume effects, spin fluctuation model for IEM based on the Ginzburg-Landau theory is given. A magnetic phase diagram in this system is obtained for the pressure and temperature. It is shown that the Curie temperature depends strongly on pressure near the boundary between the first-order and second-order transitions, while the spontaneous magnetization at 0 K does not depend so much on the pressure, which is a common property in this system. Other field-induced metamagnetic transitions, e.g., between weakly and strongly magnetic states, between antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic states and between the narrow-gap semiconductor and the metallic ferromagnet observed in FeSi, are discussed based on the basis of electronic structures obtained by band calculations. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.