Interaction between 3d transition-metal impurities in copper

We report the electronic and the magnetic properties and the interaction energies of impurity-impurity pairs of 3d transition-metals from vanadium to nickel in a fcc Cu. Self-consistent calculations utilizing the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbitals method were performed for Cu54M and Cu53M2 embedded clusters, where M stands for V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, or Ni. We obtained the equilibrium states of the first Cu neighbors around the impurities by total-energy minimization, and we also calculated the impurity-impurity interaction energies on first nearest-neighbor sites. Pairs of V, Cr, Mn, or Fe in Cu have an attractive interaction while those of Co, or Ni a very weak replusive interaction