Behaviour of actinides and their mononitrides under compression

A major advantage of ab-initio calculations is that, in principle, they need only the atomic numbers as input. Starting with this limited information one can make detailed and quantitative predictions of various properties such as ground state volume, bulk modulus and its pressure derivative, equation-of-state, and phonon dispersion relations etc of materials. In this talk I will present ab-initio density functional theory based results of the electronic properties, phonon dispersion relations, elastic constants and structural phase transitions for some of the actinides and their mononitrides. (author)