Paramagnetic form factors for cubic itinerant electron systems

Measurements of the elastic neutron scattering cross section performed over the past several decades have provided information about the induced magnetic form factor for a number of transition-metal paramagnets. These results, when converted to an absolute scale, provide a sensitive test of electronic wave functions obtained from band calculations. Numerical techniques have been developed to evaluate the static susceptibility on an absolute scale for itinerant electron systems. Results based on local density bands have been obtained for the cubic symmetry paramagnets Cr, Nb, V, Pd, and Rh and compared with experiment. Agreement ranges from excellent for Cr to reasonable for Nb.