Dynamical many-body corrections to the residual resistivity of metals

The residual resistivity of metals at the absolute zero of temperature is usually understood in terms of electrons scattering from random impurities. This mechanism, however, does not take into account dynamical many-body effects, which cannot be described in terms of a static electron-impurity potential. Here we show that dynamical corrections to the resistivity, already known to play a role in nanoscale conductors, are of quantitative importance in the calculation of the residual resistivity of simple metals, and lead to a significantly improved agreement between theory and experiment in the case of impurities embedded in an Al host. Our calculations are based on a recently proposed form of the time-dependent many-body exchange-correlation potential, which is derived from the time-dependent current density functional theory. Surprisingly, we find that the largest correction to the residual resistivity arises from the real part of the exchange-correlation kernel of time-dependent current density functional theory, rather than from its imaginary part. This unexpected result is shown to be consistent with recent theories of the dynamical corrections to the resistivity of nanoscale conductors.