The Fermi surface of aluminium

Abstract The de Haas–van Alphen data in aluminium are compared with periods arising from extremal sections on a Fermi surface defined by a fourth-order secular equation. The Fourier coefficients V 111 and V 200 of the weak pseudopotential are regarded as adjustable parameters. Several different models for the surface are shown to be possible depending on the values of V 111 and V 200. These are considered systematically. An almost exact fit to the data is obtained with V 111 = 0·0179 Ry and V 200 = 0·0562 Ry. The resulting surface differs from the one proposed by Harrison only in the third zone near W, where the low-frequency data determines the topology. As expected the cyclotron masses are all lower than the experimental values by about one-third.