Nature of Non-magnetic Strongly-correlated State in Plutonium

Local density approximation for the electronic structure calculations has been highly successful for non-correlated systems. The LDA scheme quite often failed for strongly correlated materials containing transition metals and rare-earth elements with complicated charge, spin and orbital ordering. Dynamical mean field theory in combination with the first-principle scheme (LDA+DMFT) can be a starting point to go beyond static density functional approximation and include effects of charge, spin and orbital fluctuations. Ab-initio relativistic dynamical mean-field theory is applied to resolve the long-standing controversy between theory and experiment in the 'simple' face-centered cubic phase of plutonium called delta-Pu. In agreement with experiment, neither static nor dynamical magnetic moments are predicted. In addition, the quasiparticle density of states reproduces not only the peak close to the Fermi level, which explains the large coefficient of electronic specific heat, but also main 5f features observed in photoelectron spectroscopy. (authors)