The Hall Effect in Group 1B Metals

Abstract

This chapter is a review of the progress which has been made in the interpretation of the Hall effect in Cu, Ag, and Au and in some simple alloys based on them. The available results relating to the galvanomagnetic properties of noble-metal alloys in general form a relatively large field and much of it consists of data, often collected in the course of gross metallurgical studies, which are for high-concentration binary or ternary systems that are hopelessly complex for even qualitative interpretation from a fundamental point of view. It is only in the cases of the pure metals, some very dilute alloys, and certain α-phase alloys having either homovalent or polyvalent solutes that some progress toward a fundamental understanding has been made. That is the subject of this chapter and we find it convenient to divide it arbitrarily into the three foregoing categories, which are considered separately in Sections 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. In this introduction we briefly review for the benefit of the nonspecialist reader those aspects of the electronic structure of the group IB metals which bear directly on the interpretation of the Hall effect data.