Magnetic moment formation at a dilute Ce(140) impurity in RCo₂ compounds

A great deal of experimental work using perturbed angular correlation (PAC) has succeed in measuring hyperfine fields in Ce diluted in metallic systems, thus allowing the determination of the local impurity moment at low temperatures. Motivated by such experimental work on Ce(140) placed on a R site of the rare earth (R = Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er) in RCo_2, we theoretically discuss, within a simple model, the local magnetic moments and thereby calculate the magnetic hyperfine fields. The results are in good agreement with the experimental data. For the sake of comparison we recall our previous results on Ta d-impurity embedded in the same hosts.