No Arabic abstract
The new challenges posed by the need of finding strong rare-earth free magnets demand methods that can predict magnetization and magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy (MAE). We argue that correlated electron effects, which are normally underestimated in band structure calculations, play a crucial role in the development of the orbital component of the magnetic moments. Because magnetic anisotropy arises from this orbital component, the ability to include correlation effects has profound consequences on our predictive power of the MAE of strong magnets. Here we show that incorporating the local effects of electronic correlations with dynamical mean-field theory provides reliable estimates of the orbital moment, the mass enhancement and the MAE of YCo5.
Materials with correlated electrons often respond very strongly to external or internal influences, leading to instabilities and states of matter with broken symmetry. This behavior can be studied theoretically either by evaluating the linear response characteristics, or by simulating the ordered phases of the materials under investigation. We developed the necessary tools within the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) to search for electronic instabilities in materials close to spin-state crossovers and to analyze the properties of the corresponding ordered states. This investigation, motivated by the physics of LaCoO$_3$, led to a discovery of condensation of spinful excitons in the two-orbital Hubbard model with a surprisingly rich phase diagram. The results are reviewed in the first part of the article. Electronic correlations can also be the driving force behind structural transformations of materials. To be able to investigate correlation-induced phase instabilities we developed and implemented a formalism for the computation of total energies and forces within a fully charge self-consistent combination of density functional theory and DMFT. Applications of this scheme to the study of structural instabilities of selected correlated electron materials such as Fe and FeSe are reviewed in the second part of the paper.
We present an ab initio quantum theory of the finite temperature magnetism of iron and nickel. A recently developed technique which combines dynamical mean-field theory with realistic electronic structure methods, successfully describes the many-body features of the one electron spectra and the observed magnetic moments below and above the Curie temperature.
The LDA+DMFT method is a very powerful tool for gaining insight into the physics of strongly correlated materials. It combines traditional ab-initio density-functional techniques with the dynamical mean-field theory. The core aspects of the method are (i) building material-specific Hubbard-like many-body models and (ii) solving them in the dynamical mean-field approximation. Step (i) requires the construction of a localized one-electron basis, typically a set of Wannier functions. It also involves a number of approximations, such as the choice of the degrees of freedom for which many-body effects are explicitly taken into account, the scheme to account for screening effects, or the form of the double-counting correction. Step (ii) requires the dynamical mean-field solution of multi-orbital generalized Hubbard models. Here central is the quantum-impurity solver, which is also the computationally most demanding part of the full LDA+DMFT approach. In this chapter I will introduce the core aspects of the LDA+DMFT method and present a prototypical application.
We discuss the recently proposed LDA+DMFT approach providing consistent parameter free treatment of the so called double counting problem arising within the LDA+DMFT hybrid computational method for realistic strongly correlated materials. In this approach the local exchange-correlation portion of electron-electron interaction is excluded from self consistent LDA calculations for strongly correlated electronic shells, e.g. d-states of transition metal compounds. Then the corresponding double counting term in LDA+DMFT Hamiltonian is consistently set in the local Hartree (fully localized limit - FLL) form of the Hubbard model interaction term. We present the results of extensive LDA+DMFT calculations of densities of states, spectral densities and optical conductivity for most typical representatives of two wide classes of strongly correlated systems in paramagnetic phase: charge transfer insulators (MnO, CoO and NiO) and strongly correlated metals (SrVO3 and Sr2RuO4). It is shown that for NiO and CoO systems LDA+DMFT qualitatively improves the conventional LDA+DMFT results with FLL type of double counting, where CoO and NiO were obtained to be metals. We also include in our calculations transition metal 4s-states located near the Fermi level missed in previous LDA+DMFT studies of these monooxides. General agreement with optical and X-ray experiments is obtained. For strongly correlated metals LDA$^prime$+DMFT results agree well with earlier LDA+DMFT calculations and existing experiments. However, in general LDA+DMFT results give better quantitative agreement with experimental data for band gap sizes and oxygen states positions, as compared to the conventional LDA+DMFT.
We have implemented the $GW$+dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) approach in the Vienna ab initio simulation package. Employing the interaction values obtained from the locally unscreened random phase approximation (RPA), we compare $GW$+DMFT and LDA+DMFT against each other and against experiment for SrVO$_3$. We observed a partial compensation of stronger electronic correlations due to the reduced $GW$ bandwidth and weaker correlations due to a larger screening of the RPA interaction, so that the obtained spectra are quite similar and well agree with experiment. Noteworthily, the $GW$+DMFT better reproduces the position of the lower Hubbard side band.