We report a systematic study of lattice relaxation effects around 3d and 4sp impurities in aluminum, using the full-potential Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker Green function method. Our results for the magnetic properties of the impurities seem to resolve the discrepancy between experiment and previous calculations. In addition, the calculated atomic displacements and total volume changes are in good agreement with the corresponding experimental data.

We present a theoretical analysis of the photonic band structure of fcc colloidal crystals in relation to experimentally available transmission spectra of finite slabs of such crystals.

We report a systematic study of low-field galvanomagnetic properties of aluminium-based dilute alloys with 3d and 4sp impurities. The low-field magnetoresistivity tensor is determined by exactly solving the linearized Boltzmann equation for the anisotropic vector mean free path, without using any adjustable parameter. Our method of calculation is based on the on-Fermi-sphere approximation which allows us to combine the full anisotropy of the host Fermi surface, obtained by the four-orthogonal-plane-wave method, with the impurity scattering phase shifts, evaluated by self-consistent local-density-functional impurity-in-jellium calculations. Our results for the Hall coefficient and the magnetoresistance are in good agreement with the experimental data.

The full-potential Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker Green function method is extended to treat the lattice distortion in the vicinity of a point defect. The method is applied to predict the atomic positions in the neighborhood of d and sp substitutional impurities in Cu. Both the total energy and the Hellmann-Feynman force are used for the calculation of the ground-state configuration, while the semicore states of the impurities are treated as valence states. Our results for the atomic displacements are in very good agreement with the experimental data from extended x-ray-absorption fine-structure and lattice-parameter measurements.