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Landau diamagnetism is the orbital response of mobile Electrons to an applied magnetic field, arising from quantization of their transverse motion. For a noninteracting three-dimensional isotropic Electron gas with quadratic dispersion, electron spin with $g=2$ and magnetic fields weak enough for the smooth-response limit, its susceptibility is ${\chi }_L=-{\chi }_P/3$, where ${\chi }_P$ is the Pauli paramagnetism susceptibility. Band effective masses, interactions, dimensionality and resolved magnetic quantum oscillations can change this simple relation.

A localized orbital with two electron spin states has energies $E_0=0$, $E_1=ϵ$ and $E_2=2ϵ+U$. Its zero-temperature equilibrium occupation minimizes ${\mathcal{E}}_N=E_N-\mu N$, where $\mu$ is the chemical potential. For repulsion $U>0$, the occupation is successively $0,1,2$ as $\mu$ crosses $ϵ$ and $ϵ+U$. For attraction $U<0$, the singly occupied state is never the minimum: the occupation jumps from $0$ to $2$ at $\mu =ϵ+U/2$. Exactly at a crossing the ground-state occupation is not unique.

At positive temperature, its grand canonical partition function is $\Xi =1+2e^{-\beta (ϵ-\mu )}+e^{-\beta (2ϵ+U-2\mu )}$, where $\beta =1/(k_{B}T)$. The expected value of the occupation follows by differentiating: $⟨N⟩=k_{B}T{\partial }_{\mu }\ln \Xi$. The factor two counts the two singly occupied microstates, not an additional pair state.

For weak fields in a linear isotropic material, magnetization is $\mathbf{M}={\chi }_m\mathbf{H}$, with magnetic susceptibility ${\chi }_m$. Paramagnetism has ${\chi }_m>0$, while diamagnetism has ${\chi }_m<0$. In either case, $\mathbf{B}={\mu }_0(\mathbf{H}+\mathbf{M})={\mu }_0(1+{\chi }_m)\mathbf{H}$. These weak responses generally disappear when the applied field is removed, unlike hysteretic ferromagnetism.

A paramagnet can contain permanent magnetic moments from unpaired Electrons or atomic angular momentum. Alignment lowers the energy $-\mathbf{\mu }\cdot \mathbf{B}$, while thermal disorder opposes it. For independent classical moments of magnitude $\mu$, their weak-field average projection is ${\mu }^{2}B/(3k_{B}T)$, soThis is Curie's law; it assumes weak magnetization and no important interactions between moments. With quantum angular momentum $J$, replace ${\mu }^2$ by $(g{\mu }_B{)}^{2}J(J+1)$. Strong-field magnetization saturates instead of growing linearly without limit. Conduction Electrons also exhibit Pauli paramagnetism: only occupations near the Fermi surface readily redistribute between spin states, giving a nearly temperature-independent susceptibility when $T\ll T_F$.

Diamagnetism is an induced orbital response opposing the applied magnetic field. For bound Electrons, a weak field changes orbital motion and induces an opposing magnetic moment. For an isotropic collection of atoms, the elementary orbital estimate iswhere the sum runs over the Electrons of one atom. It is usually small and weakly temperature dependent. Delocalized Electrons also have orbital Landau diamagnetism; for an ideal three-dimensional free Electron gas with a quadratic isotropic dispersion and electron spin with $g=2$, ${\chi }_L=-{\chi }_P/3$. Both spin and orbital contributions must be included to determine the total response. Diamagnetism is not a consequence of permanent dipoles choosing to align against the field; that orientation would increase their energy.