Electronic structure and magnetism in UGa2: DFT+DMFT approach

Banhi Chatterjee; Jindrich Kolorenc

doi:10.1103/physrevb.103.205146

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2102.08224

Electronic structure and magnetism in UGa2: DFT+DMFT approach

Banhi Chatterjee·Jindrich Kolorenc

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The debate whether uranium 5f electrons are closer to being localized or itinerant in the ferromagnetic compound UGa2 is not yet fully settled. The experimentally determined magnetic moments are large, approximately 3 Bohr magnetons, suggesting the localized character of the 5f electrons. In the same time, one can identify signs of itinerant as well as localized behavior in various spectroscopic observations. The band theory, employing local exchange-correlation functionals, is biased toward itinerant 5f states and severely underestimates the moments. Using material-specific dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), we probe how a less approximate description of electron-electron correlations improves the picture. We present two variants of the theory: starting either from spin-restricted (LDA) or spin-polarized (LSDA) band structure. We show that the L(S)DA+DMFT method can accurately describe the magnetic moments in UGa2 as long as the exchange interaction between the uranium 6d and 5f electrons is preserved by a judicious choice of the spin-polarized double-counting correction. We discuss the computed electronic structure in relation to photoemission experiments and show how the correlations reduce the Sommerfeld coefficient of the electronic specific heat by shifting the 5f states slightly away from the Fermi level.

Explore related subjects

cond-mat.str-el cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Banhi Chatterjee, Jindrich Kolorenc. 2021-02-16. Electronic structure and magnetism in UGa2: DFT+DMFT approach. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.103.205146

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Competing Interlayer Loop Currents and Superconductivity in the Bilayer $t$-$J_\perp$-$V$ Model

The recent discovery of high-$T_c$ superconductivity in pressurized and thin-film bilayer nickelates, featuring a strong interlayer exchange coupling, and their potential similarities with cuprate superconductors, has made this a very active topic in condensed matter physics. In the present paper we study the strongly correlated one-orbital ($d_{x^2-y^2}$) bilayer $t$-$J_\perp$-$V$ model for nickelates, where $V$ denotes the Coulomb interactions, using a controlled large-$N$ expansion at and beyond the mean-field level. Focusing on the out-of-plane spin exchange interaction ($J_\perp$), we find that it triggers both out-of-plane $s$-wave superconductivity and an out-of-plane bond-order phase ($z$-BOP) instability. The $z$-BOP gives rise to a complex $z$-axis hopping dominated by its imaginary component, which drives out-of-plane currents and induces in-plane ones, spontaneously forming on the vertical plaquettes a loop-current state that breaks time-reversal symmetry. Competition between this loop-current phase and superconductivity yields a dome-shaped superconducting region, with optimal superconductivity occurring near the $z$-BOP quantum critical point. The resulting phase diagram features a pure loop-current region, a low-doping coexistence phase, a pure superconducting state at higher doping, and a correlated metallic state.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Optically induced metallic state with persistent monoclinic symmetry in NdNiO$_3$

Understanding whether electronic and structural order remain coupled under nonequilibrium conditions is a central challenge in correlated materials. Here, we simultaneously track metallicity and symmetry across the photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition in NdNiO$_3$ using time-resolved optical reflectivity and symmetry-sensitive second-harmonic generation. We find that metallic reflectivity emerges at significantly lower excitation fluence than restoration of the orthorhombic high-temperature symmetry. As a result, optical excitation stabilizes a metastable state that combines the reflectivity of the metallic phase with the monoclinic symmetry of the insulating phase, revealing an optically induced monoclinic metal. Only at substantially higher fluences does the symmetry fully recover to that of the high-temperature phase. These results demonstrate a nonequilibrium decoupling of metallicity and structural symmetry and establish simultaneous multiprobe spectroscopy as a powerful approach for identifying emergent phases in correlated materials.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Instabilities in self-consistent diagrammatic approaches and how to cure them

While self-consistent diagrammatic approaches are widely used to compute the physical properties of correlated quantum materials, their applicability may get severely hindered precisely in the parameter regions, where the most exciting physics is observed. One of the major issues, referred to as "misleading convergence", is the tendency of iterative schemes to converge to unphysical fixed points for intermediate-to-strong electronic interactions, regardless of numerical accuracy of the computation. Here, we explicitly verify that the origin of this problem in several established self-consistent many-electron approaches, defined in the general diagrammatic framework of the boson-exchange formalism, resides exclusively in the stability condition of the respective iteration schemes, and not in an intrinsic breakdown of their self-consistent diagrammatic description. This insight enables a simple and general remedy, as recently proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 016502 (2026): The redefinition of the iterative procedure, by inverting the unstable eigendirections of the Jacobian associated to the fixed point of the self-consistent algorithm. We illustrate the successful outcome of this procedure by means of systematic calculations performed on testbed, exactly solvable, models. Our results demonstrate that the physical fixed point of the diagrammatic schemes we considered can be stabilized, de facto, across the entire parameter range, including the most challenging nonperturbative/strong-coupling regimes.

cond-mat.str-el↗