UCd 11 : A strongly localized 5 f 3 material

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.