| AVS 60th International Symposium and Exhibition | |
| Actinides and Rare Earths Focus Topic | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session AC+AS+EN-TuA |
| Session: | Actinides and Rare Earths: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Critical Materials |
| Presenter: | S. Fujimori, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Japan |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Electronic structure of uranium materials have been studied by means of photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) as well as angle-resolved PES (ARPES) using synchrotron radiations. The results on the nuclear fuel material UN as well as uranium heavy Fermion superconductors UPd2Al3 will be presented.
Uranium monoride (UN) is a promising fuel material for the generation-IV advanced nuclear reactors since it has high melting point, a very good thermal conductivity at high temperatures as well as a high fuel density. We have revealed its electronic structure by ARPES, and found that they are well explained by the band structure calculation based on local density approximation (LDA) [1].
UPd2Al3 is a heavy Fermion superconductor. It shows transitions into the antiferromagnetic phase at TN=14 K and into the superconducting phase at TSC=2 K. Since U 5f electrons in these compounds show both pronounced localized and delocalized characters, the nature of U 5f electrons have been not well understood. Their detailed electronic structure was derived by ARPES by synchrotron radiation as well as very high resolution PES by leaser. It was found that quasi-particle bands with strong U 5f character form Fermi surface at low temperatures, suggesting that U 5f electrons have itinerant nature in this compound. Furthermore, we have succeeded to observe the superconducting gap of this compound by PES [2]. This is the first observation of the superconducting states of actinide materials by PES.
[1] Shin-ichi Fujimori et al., Phys. Rev. B 86, 235108 (2012).
[2] Y. Ohta et al., in preparation.