Ab initio Derivation of Low-Energy Hamiltonians for Systems with Strong Spin-Orbit Interaction and Its Application to Ca5Ir3O12

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ab initio method to derive low-energy Hamiltonians for materials with strong spin-orbit interactions, exemplified by Ca5Ir3O12, revealing its strong correlation and competing spin-orbit physics.

Contribution

The paper develops a formalism and code to derive effective low-energy Hamiltonians incorporating spin-orbit effects for complex materials.

Findings

Ca5Ir3O12 is a strongly correlated electron system.

The spin-orbit interaction energy scale is comparable to Hund exchange.

The derived Hamiltonian reveals competing spin, charge, and orbital physics.

Abstract

We present an ab initio derivation method for effective low-energy Hamiltonians of material with strong spin-orbit interactions. The effective Hamiltonian is described in terms of the Wannier function in the spinor form, and effective interactions are derived with the constrained random phase approximation (cRPA) method. Based on this formalism and the developed code, we derive an effective Hamiltonian of a strong spin-orbit interaction material Ca5Ir3O12. This system consists of three edge-shared IrO6 octahedral chains arranged along the c axis, and the three Ir atoms in the ab plane compose a triangular lattice. For such a complicated structure, we need to set up the Wannier spinor function under the local coordinate system. We found that a density-functional band structure near the Fermi level is formed by local dxy and dyz orbitals. Then, we constructed the ab initio dxy/dyz model. The estimated nearest neighbor transfer t is close to 0.2 eV, and the cRPA onsite U and neighboring V electronic interactions are found to be 2.4-2.5 eV and 1 eV, respectively. The resulting characteristic correlation strength defined by (U-V)/t is above 7, and thus this material is classified as a strongly correlated electron system. The onsite transfer integral involved in the spin-orbit interaction is 0.2 eV, which is comparable to the onsite exchange integrals near 0.2 eV, indicating that the spin-orbit-interaction physics would compete with the Hund physics. Based on these calculated results, we discuss possible rich ground-state low-energy electronic structures of spin, charge and orbitals with competing Hund, spin-orbit and strong correlation physics.