ANISOTROPIC DIELECTRIC RESPONSE OF FERROMAGNETIC COBALT

A self-consistent electronic structure for hexagonal close-packed ferromagnetic cobalt is obtained through the linear muffin tin orbital (LMTO) method. Using the derived band scheme, the frequency (omega) dependent dielectric function for the electric field parallel (epsilon(parallel to)) and perpendicular (epsilon(perpendicular to)) to the c-axis for the majority and minority spin bands have been calculated. It is observed that the main contribution to the total epsilon(omega) comes from the minority spin band, and that epsilon(perpendicular to)(omega) contains more structure than epsilon(parallel to)(omega). These observations are rather well confirmed by the experimental results.