One-electron physics of the actinides

We present a detailed analysis of the one-electron physics of the actinides. Various linear muffin-tin orbital basis sets are analyzed in order to determine a robust bare Hamiltonian for the actinides. The hybridization between f and spd states is compared with the f-f hopping in order to understand the Anderson-like and Hubbard-like contributions to itineracy in the actinides. We show that both contributions decrease strongly as one moves from the light actinides to the heavy actinides, while the Anderson-like contribution dominates in all cases. A real-space analysis of the band structure shows that nearest-neighbor hopping dominates the physics in these materials. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results to the delocalization transition as a function of atomic number across the actinide series.