Correlated electronic structure of LaOFeAs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the electronic properties of LaOFeAs using advanced computational methods, revealing it as a strongly correlated metal with unconventional superconductivity likely not driven by phonons.

Contribution

It combines Density Functional Theory and Dynamical Mean Field Theory to analyze LaOFeAs, providing new insights into its correlated electronic structure and superconducting mechanism.

Findings

LaOFeAs is a strongly correlated metal in the normal state.

The parent compound is a bad metal near a metal-insulator transition.

Superconductivity is likely not phonon-mediated.

Abstract

We compute the electronic structure, momentum resolved spectral function and optical conductivity of the new superconductor LaO$_{1-x}$F$_x$FeAs within the combination of the Density functional theory and the Dynamical Mean Field Theory. We find that the compound in the normal state is a strongly correlated metal and the parent compound is a bad metal at the verge of the metal insulator transition. We argue that the superconductivity is not phonon mediated.