A hydrogenic donor state has an exponentially decaying envelope . Neighbouring donors at typical separation therefore have exponentially small orbital overlap. The corresponding hopping integral is of order , apart from algebraic factors and factors from the number of neighbours. Hybridizing many such localized states produces an impurity band with a bandwidth of the same scale:
The order-one constant absorbs details of the donor spacing and envelope. The exponential dependence expresses quantum tunnelling between weakly overlapping donor orbitals, rather than thermal excitation over the donor binding energy.
Use the stipulated noninteracting impurity band approximation, with one donated electron per donor and two available spin states per donor orbital. The energy band is half filled. Approximating its spin-summed density of states per volume near the Fermi energy by gives the zero-temperature Pauli paramagnetism
With ,
A factor of order one depends on the density of states shape; using the conduction band -factor rather than silently setting matters here.
To locate the comparison with the magnitude of the undoped Larmor-Langevin susceptibility, put . Numerically,
For the stated atomic-scale estimate in part (b), equality with requires
Thus the dilute-branch crossover is
well below . Within this model the positive spin response exceeds the negative background magnitude for lower dopant densities on this dilute branch: the exponential narrowing of wins over the loss of donors. Indeed for . This is not a claim of ferromagnetism.
The degenerate Pauli paramagnetism calculation requires , with an unimportant order-one filling factor. At the estimated crossing,
The weak-field condition also requires . For a different assumed atomic , use in the displayed equation for . An order-of-magnitude background gives the same density order and a crossover scale of order . At higher temperature than this extremely narrow bandwidth permits, the enhancement cannot be used; the independent-donor Curie law is the appropriate thermal scale if interactions remain negligible. At very small dopant density, disorder, localization and Coulomb interactions can also invalidate the assumed noninteracting impurity band. The formal divergence as is therefore a limit of the stated zero-temperature band model, not a prediction for isolated donors at a fixed nonzero temperature.