Pressure effects on the electronic properties in CeCoIn5: A first-principle study

Superconducting heavy fermions are exotic materials with strong electronic correlations. The temperature-pressure phase diagrams of some of these materials show a complex interplay between superconductivity and magnetism that is essential to understand the physical properties of these systems. In this work, first principle calculations are performed in order to study the pressure effects on the electronic correlations in the CeCoIn5 system, which is superconducting at ambient pressure with Tc = 2.3 K. The density functional theory (DFT) method was used to include on-site coulomb repulsions (U) at the d (Co and In) and f (Ce) electrons of the CeCoIn5 compound. External applied pressures were simulated by correlating an applied pressure with a reduction of the volume of the unit cell, but keeping constant the c/a relation, as reported in experiments. Our findings reveal that the U parameters for all atomic species increase linearly with the pressure (P), being this effect higher for the f-electrons of the cerium ions, where dU/dP=1.2 eV/GPa. In summary, these results not only suggest that the pressure effect can be correlated with an increase in the electronic correlations in the CeCoIn5 compound, as also, the work allows quantify this effect.