On the atomic orbital magnetism: A rigorous derivation of the Larmor and Van Vleck contributions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to rigorously investigate the orbital magnetism of core electrons in 3-dimensional crystalline ordered solids and in the zero-temperature regime. To achieve that, we consider a non-interacting Fermi gas subjected to an external periodic potential modeling the crystalline field within the tight-binding approximation (i.e. when the distance between two consecutive ions is large). For a fixed number of particles in the Wigner-Seitz cell and in the zero-temperature limit, we derive an asymptotic expansion for the bulk zero-field orbital susceptibility. We prove that the leading term is the superposition of the Larmor diamagnetic contribution, generated by the quadratic part of the Zeeman Hamiltonian, together with the 'complete' orbital Van Vleck paramagnetic contribution, generated by the linear part of the Zeeman Hamiltonian, and related to field-induced electronic transitions.