Magnetic susceptibility and atomic structure of paramagnetic Zr–(Co, Ni, Cu) amorphous alloys Ramir Ristic ´ a, * , Emil Babic ´ b a Faculty of Philosophy, POB 144, HR-31000 Osijek, Croatia b Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, POB 331, HR-10002 Zagreb, Croatia Available online 10 July 2007 Abstract The experimental results for the magnetic susceptibility and superconducting transition temperature of amorphous Zr–(Co, Ni, Cu) alloys extending over a wide composition range are analyzed in some detail. By combining the results of this analysis with the literature results for the electronic density of states at E F for the same alloy systems we obtained a set of parameters associated with the electronic structure of the amorphous Zr. The comparison of these parameters with the results of the band structure calculations for different crys- talline phases of Zr and with the results of the atomic structure and crystallization studies of the same alloy systems indicates an fcc-like local atomic structure for amorphous Zr. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. PACS: 71.23.Cq Keywords: Amorphous metals, metallic glasses; Crystallization; Electrical and electronic properties; Magnetic properties 1. Introduction Amorphous Zr–M alloys (M = 3d element) are arche- typal glassy TE–TL alloys (TE and TL denote the early and late transition metal, respectively) which have been extensively studied in recent decades [1]. Glassy TE–TL alloys show some unusual phenomena (such as a positive Hall coefficient [2], quantum interference effects [3], large induced conductivity anisotropy [4], etc.) which lead to the development of novel concepts for the calculation of their local atomic [5] and electronic structures [6]. The wide glass-forming range (usually from 20 to 70 at.% TL) enables a detailed study of the changes in the chemical short range order (CSRO) and electronic density of states (DOS) on alloying and hence through comparison between the model and experiment. For paramagnetic TE–TL alloys the properties that are directly related to DOS show simple, often linear variation with TL content [1,2,4,7]. These findings were correlated with ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy (UPS) results [1,8] which showed that over a wide composition range DOS at the Fermi level (E F ) is dominated by TE d-states. Hence, the effect of alloying with TL can be approximated with the dilution of amorphous TE [7,9]. This idea was recently used in order to deduce the DOS and local atomic structure of the amorphous Ti, Zr and Hf [10]. In particu- lar, the extrapolation of the literature specific heat (LTSH) and superconductivity data for (Ti,Zr,Hf)–(Ni,Cu) glassy alloys to zero Ni, Cu content was used in order to obtain the bare DOS at E F (N 0 (E F )) for amorphous Ti, Zr and Hf. The N 0 (E F ) obtained agreed well with those calculated for cubic (fcc and bcc) crystalline phases of the same metals [11]. On the basis of additional information provided from the atomic structure [12] and crystallization [13] studies the author singled out the fcc-like local structure for amor- phous Ti, Zr and Hf [10]. Here, we use our magnetic susceptibility and supercon- ductivity results for paramagnetic amorphous Zr–(Co, Ni, Cu) alloys in order to check if these results also support 0022-3093/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jnoncrysol.2007.05.043 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +385 31 211400; fax: +385 31 212 514. E-mail address: rristic@ffos.hr (R. Ristic ´). www.elsevier.com/locate/jnoncrysol Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids 353 (2007) 3108–3112