The story of magnetism: from Heisenberg, Slater, and Stoner to Van Vleck, and the issues of exchange and correlation

Abstract: This article is devoted to the development of the central ideas in the field of magnetism. The presentation is semi-technical in nature and it roughly follows the chronological order. The key contributions of Van Vleck, Dorfman, Pauli, Heisenberg, and Landau are presented. Then the advent of the field of itinerant electron magnetism starting with the investigations of Bloch and Wigner, and more successful formulation by Slater and Stoner is presented. The physical basis of the Slater-Stoner theory is discussed and its problems are summarized. Then, an overview of the debate between itinerant electron view of Stoner and localized electron view of Heisenberg is presented. Connected with this debate are the issues of exchange interactions. The issues related to the origin of exchange interaction in Stoner model are discussed. We review the "middle-road" theory of van Vleck and Hurwitz--the very first theory which takes into account the electron correlation effects in the itinerant model. We close our presentation with the discussion of the very important issue of strong electron correlation in the itinerant picture.