Interplay of spin-orbit and entropic effects in Cerium

Abstract

We perform first-principle calculations of elemental cerium and compute its pressure-temperature phase diagram, finding good quantitative agreement with the experiments. Our calculations indicate that, while a signature of the volume-collapse transition appears in the free energy already at low temperatures, at larger temperatures this signature is enhanced because of the entropic effects, and originates an actual thermodynamical instability. Furthermore, we find that the catalyst determining this feature is --- in all temperature regimes --- a pressure-induced effective reduction of the $f$-level degeneracy due to the spin-orbit coupling. Our analysis suggests also that the lattice vibrations might be crucial in order to capture the behavior of the pressure-temperature transition line at large temperatures.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Rotationally-invariant slave-boson formalism and momentum dependence of the quasiparticle weight
• Thermodynamic and spectral properties of compressed Ce calculated by the merger of the local density approximation and dynamical mean field theory
• Equivalence of Gutzwiller and slave-boson mean-field theories for multi-band Hubbard models
• The role of thermal disorder for magnetism and the $\alpha -\gamma$ transition in Cerium; Results from density-functional theory

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Thermodynamics of the $\alpha$-$\gamma$ transition in cerium studied by an LDA + Gutzwiller method
• Quantum fluctuations beyond the Gutzwiller approximation