Abstract
We study the combined effect of temperature and disorder in the spacer on the interlayer exchange coupling. The temperature dependence is treated ab initio like by employing the spin-polarized surface Green function technique within the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital method and the Lloyd formulation of the IEC. The integrals involving the Fermi-Dirac distribution are calculated using an efficient method based on a representation of integrands by a sum of complex exponentials. Application is made to Co/Cu1-x M x /Co(001) trilayers (M =Zn, Au, and Ni) with varying thickness of the spacer.