Extreme Fermi Surface Smearing in a Maximally Disordered Concentrated Solid Solution

Abstract

We show that the Fermi surface can survive the presence of extreme compositional disorder in the equiatomic alloy Ni_{0.25}Fe_{0.25}Co_{0.25}Cr_{0.25}. Our high-resolution Compton scattering experiments reveal a Fermi surface which is smeared across a significant fraction of the Brillouin zone (up to 40% of 2π/a). The extent of this smearing and its variation on and between different sheets of the Fermi surface have been determined, and estimates of the electron mean free path and residual resistivity have been made by connecting this smearing with the coherence length of the quasiparticle states.