We report calculations of extremal areas of four Fermi surface (FS) orbits of the noble metals using the linear muffin tin orbital method in the atomic sphere approximation. Our calculations indicate that thel = 3 potential parameters and increase in the number of k-points in the Brillouin zone (BZ) summation from 240 to 916 have no significant effect on the FS. All calculations were performed self-consistently including up tol = 2 potential parameters and with 240 k points in the BZ summation. Calculations were performed with the exchange, correlation potentials (XCP) of Barth-Hedin, Barth-Hedin modified by Janak, SlaterX_α, and the Vosko-Wilk-Nussair. Results compared with other theoretical calculations indicate that none of the above XC potentials give an accurate representation of the FS for all the noble metals. We feel that the inclusion of the non-locality of XCP may give a better account of the FS geometry.

Excess molar volumes (V^E) and deviation in isentropic compressibilities (Δβ_s) have been investigated from the density ρ and speed of sound u measurements of six binary liquid mixtures containing n-alkanes over the entire range of composition at 298.15 K. Excess molar volume exhibits inversion in sign in one binary mixture, i.e., n-heptane + n-hexane. Remaining five binary mixtures, n-heptane + toluene, cyclohexane + n-heptane, cyclohexane + n-hexane, toluene + n-hexane and n-decane + n-hexane show negative excess molar volumes over the whole composition range. However, the large negative values of excess molar volume becomes domainant in toluene + n-hexane mixture. Deviation in isentropic compressibility is negative over the whole range of composition in the case of all the six binary mixtures. Existence of specific intermolecular interactions in the mixtures has been analyzed in terms of excess molar volume and deviation in isentropic compressibility.