Electrical Transport Properties of Liquid Li1 – xNax Alloys

Metals, being a less resistive to the flow of electrons, have been used for electrical conduction since the beginning. The factors affecting this flow have always been a focus of researchers working in this field. With the development of material science and the condensed matter physics, a high degree of accurate prediction for the electron behavior in the solid phase of the metals becomes possible. However, the liquid state is more unpredictable in metals as well as in alloys. Electron flow and hence the other properties of the sample as a whole will get change when two or more metals are combined to get form of alloys. It will be interesting to mathematically model the electrical transport in the metals and alloys, particularly in the liquid state. Alkali metals have their own importance in the field of the nuclear reactors. Lithium as having large absorption cross section is used for the coolant in many types of reactors. The small amount of electron current may in turn be converted in the cyclic heating and hence the raise in the temperature of the coolant itself. In present work, an effort has been made to check the electrical transport in liquid binary alkali alloy of lithium with sodium at different proportions. Some important electrical transport properties of the liquid Li1 – xNax binary alloys have been reported with the help of classical pseudopotential theory. The study includes the investigation of the electrical resistivity, the thermoelectric power and the thermal conductivity of the said alloy using a universal model potential of Fiolhais et al. for the first time to the best of our knowledge. Variety of the local field correction functions (starting from a static dielectric function given by Hartree (H) to the exchange and correlation functions given by Hubbard-Sham (HS), Taylor (T), Vashishta-Singwi (VS), Farid et al. (F), Ichimaru-Utsumi (IU), Nagy (N) including recent one given by Sarkar et al. (S)) are employed in the present computations and found appropriate for such a study. The presently computed values of the electrical resistivity agree reasonably well with the experimental data.