AB-INITIO ELECTRON THEORY FOR HARD-MAGNETIC RARE-EARTH-TRANSITION-METAL INTERMETALLICS

For the development of new hard-magnetic materials a better understanding of the physical mechanisms which determine the intrinsic magnetic material parameters are of invaluable importance. In this review it is demonstrated that the modem ab initio electron theory yields a considerable help in this direction and may provide data on quantities which are hard to determine reliably by experiments. As an example, theoretical results are reported for the intrinsic magnetic material parameters (local magnetic moments, local magnetic hyperfine fields, crystal-field parameters and effective exchange interactions) of the series R2Fe14B (R = rare earth).