Invited Paper AC+AS+MI+SA+SS-MoA3
DMFT Modeling of Electronic Spectral Properties in Pu-based Actinides

Monday, November 10, 2014, 2:40 pm, Room 301

Plutonium-based materials have been studied for many years due to their importance in nuclear energy applications. Scientifically, these materials exhibit highly complex properties. Pu metal shows a significant volume expansion and anomalous magnetic properties; while Pu-115 (like PuCoGa₅) are found to be superconductors. These intriguing phenomena originate from the special location of Pu in the Periodic Table, which is at the boundary between the light actinides that have itinerant 5f electrons and the heavy actinides with localized 5f electrons. They call out the notion of strong correlation of 5f electrons. In this talk, I will present a study of the electronic structure of Pu metals and its 115 compounds in the framework of the combination of local density functional approximation and dynamical mean-field theory. In particular, the results on momentum-resolved spectral functions will be presented and be compared with those based on the LDA only. In addition, the effect of Pu 5f electron occupancy on the electronic structure of these systems will also be discussed. The test of these results by future angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements will give a stringent constraint on the theoretical approach.