Intermediate-pressure phases of cerium studied by an LDA + Gutzwiller method

Abstract

The thermodynamic stable phase of cerium metal in the intermediate pressure regime (5.0--13.0 GPa) is studied in detail by the newly developed local-density approximation (LDA)+ Gutzwiller method, which can include the strong correlation effect among the 4\textit{f} electrons in cerium metal properly. Our numerical results show that the $α"$ phase, which has the distorted body-centered-tetragonal structure, is the thermodynamic stable phase in the intermediate pressure regime and all the other phases including the $α'$ phase ($α$-U structure), $α$ phase (fcc structure), and bct phases are either metastable or unstable. Our results are quite consistent with the most recent experimental data.

17 pages, 7 figures