First-principles theory of multipolar order in actinide dioxides

AbstractMagnetic phase transitions that involve multipolar degrees of freedom have been widely studied during the last couple of decades, challenging the common approximation which assumes that the physical properties of a magnetic material could be effectively described by purely dipolar degrees of freedom. Due to the complexity of the problem and to the large number of competing interactions involved, the simple (fcc) crystal structure of the actinide dioxides made them the ideal playground system for such theoretical and experimental studies. In the present paper, we summarize our recent attempts to provide an ab initio description of the ordered phases of UO2, NpO2, and AmO2 by means of state-of-the-art LDA+U first-principles calculations. This systematic analysis of the electronic structures is here naturally connected to the local crystalline fields of the 5f states in the actinide dioxide series. Related to these we find that the mechanisms which lead to the experimentally observed insulating ground states work in distinctly different ways for each compound

High-performance descriptor for magnetic materials:Accurate discrimination of magnetic symmetries

The magnetic structure is crucial in determining the physical properties inherent in magnetic compounds. We present an adequate descriptor for magnetic structure with proper magnetic symmetry and high discrimination performance, which does not depend on artificial choices for coordinate origin, axis, and magnetic unit cell in crystal. We extend the formalism called ``smooth overlap of atomic positions'' (SOAP) providing a numerical representation of atomic configurations to that of magnetic moment configurations. We introduce the descriptor in terms of the vector spherical harmonics to describe a magnetic moment configuration and partial spectra from the expansion coefficients. We discuss that the lowest order partial spectrum is insufficient to discriminate the magnetic structures with different magnetic anisotropy, and a higher order partial spectrum is required in general to characterize detailed magnetic structures on the same atomic configuration. We then introduce the fourth-order partial spectrum and evaluate the discrimination performance for different magnetic structures, mainly focusing on the difference in magnetic symmetry. The modified partial spectra that are defined not to reflect the difference of magnetic anisotropy are also useful in evaluating magnetic structures obtained from first-principles calculations without spin-orbit coupling. We apply the present method to the symmetry-classified magnetic structures for the crystals of Mn$_3$Ir and Mn$_3$Sn, which are known to exhibit anomalous transport under the antiferromagnetic order, and examine the discrimination performance of the descriptor for different magnetic structures on the same crystal.Comment: 13 pages including supplementary information, 8 figure