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${UCd}_{11}$ : A strongly localized $5 f^{3}$ material

Martin Sundermann ^1,2,*, Naoki Ito ^3,*, Daisuke Takegami ^1,†, Chun-Fu Chang ¹, Sheng-Huai Chen ¹, Chang-Yang Kuo^4,5, Simone G. Altendorf ¹, Andrei Gloskovskii², Hlynur Gretarsson^2,6 et al.

Eric D. Bauer⁷, Shin-ichi Fujimori ⁸, Jan Kuneš ⁹, Liu Hao Tjeng ¹, Andrea Severing ^1,10,‡, and Atsushi Hariki ^3,§

¹Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Nöthnitzer Straße 40, 01187 Dresden, Germany
²PETRA III, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Notkestraße 85, 22607 Hamburg, Germany
³Department of Physics and Electronics, Osaka Metropolitan University, 1-1 Gakuen-cho, Nakaku, Sakai, Osaka 599-8531, Japan
⁴Department of Electrophysics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan
⁵National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, 101 Hsin-Ann Road, Hsinchu 300092, Taiwan
⁶Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Heisenbergstraße 1, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
⁷Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
⁸Materials Sciences Research Center, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Sayo, Hyogo 679-5148, Japan
⁹Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Kotlářská 2, 611 37 Brno, Czechia
¹⁰Institute of Physics II, University of Cologne, Zülpicher Straße 77, 50937 Cologne, Germany

^*These authors contributed equally to this work.
^†Present address: Department of Physics, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Hachioji 192-0397, Japan.
^‡Contact author: andrea.severing@cpfs.mpg.de
^§Contact author: hariki@omu.ac.jp

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023008 – Published 2 April, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bmn5-7539

Abstract

${UCd}_{11}$ is an antiferromagnetic uranium intermetallic compound ( $T_{N} = 5.3 K$ ) with enhanced electron mass and uranium-uranium spacings nearly twice the Hill limit, suggesting a weakly hybridized $5 f$ electronic character. Various x-ray spectroscopy techniques indicate that uranium in ${UCd}_{11}$ adopts the formal $U^{3 +} 5 f^{3}$ configuration, while core-level photoemission spectroscopy (PES) data of ${UCd}_{11}$ reveal only a weak satellite feature, typically interpreted as a signature of itinerancy. In this work, we present density functional theory (DFT) combined with dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) calculations of ${UCd}_{11}$ , using material-specific parameters tuned to reproduce valence-band PES spectra at different photon energies, thereby exploiting the energy dependence of photoionization cross sections. Our results demonstrate that ${UCd}_{11}$ is a highly localized uranium $5 f^{3}$ system. Furthermore, core-level spectra obtained from a $DFT + DMFT$ Anderson impurity model reveal that, contrary to common assumptions, the presence or absence of satellite structures is not a reliable indicator of strong correlations or itinerant $5 f$ behavior.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023008– Published 2 April, 2026

Vol. 8, Iss. 2 — April - June 2026

Received 17 December 2025
Accepted 27 February 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/bmn5-7539

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by Max Planck Society.

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${UCd}_{11}$ : A strongly localized $5 f^{3}$ material

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UCd11: A strongly localized 5f3 material

Abstract

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

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References (46)

${UCd}_{11}$ : A strongly localized $5 f^{3}$ material