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J. Glasbrenner, K. Belashchenko, J. Kudrnovsky, V. Drchal, S. Khmelevskyi, I. Turek:
"First-principles study of spin-disorder resistivity of heavy rare-earth metals: Gd-Tm series";
Physical Review B, 85 (2012), 2144051 - 2144058.

Electrical resistivity of heavy rare-earth metals has a dominant contribution from thermal spin-disorder
scattering. Here this spin-disorder resistivity is calculated for theGd-Tm series of metals in the paramagnetic state.
Calculations are performed within the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital method using two complementary
methods: (1) averaging of the Landauer-B¨uttiker conductance of a supercell over random noncollinear
spin-disorder configurations, and (2) linear response calculations with the spin-disordered state described in
the coherent potential approximation. The agreement between these two methods is found to be excellent. The
spin-disorder resistivity in the series follows an almost universal dependence on the exchange splitting. While
the crystallographic anisotropy of the spin-disorder resistivity agrees well with experiment, its magnitude is
significantly underestimated. These results suggest that the classical picture of slowly rotating self-consistent local moments is inadequate for rare-earth metals. A simple quantum correction improves agreement with experiment
but does not fully account for the discrepancy, suggesting that more complicated scattering mechanisms may be
important.