| Strongly correlated electronic systems have presented the most challenging problems to condensed matter theorists for many years and this continues to be the case. They are complicated materials with active d or f orbitals, whose valence electrons are in the intermediate region between itinerant (band-like) and highly localized (atomic-like) limits, which demand genuine many-body treatment. Although dealing with strongly correlated systems is a notorious problem, they have drawn broad interests of both theoretical and experimental condensed matter physicists, with intensive studies carried out in the past and present. This is due to the most exotic properties associated with strongly correlated materials, such as high-temperature superconductivity, metal-insulator transition, volume collapse, Kondo effect, colossal magnetoresistance, and many others. Although density functional theory (DFT) within local density approximation (LDA) is very successful in describing a wide range of materials, it encounters difficulty in predicting strongly correlated systems. Traditionally, they have been studied by model Hamiltonians with empirical parameters. The development of dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) and its marriage to DFT have brought new hope for first-principle study of strongly correlated systems. In this work, electronic structures of select strongly correlated systems are studied using LDA+DMFT. As theoretical backgrounds, reviews of DFT and DMFT are given in the first few chapters, where we also introduce the philosophy and workflow of LDA+DMFT. In the following chapters, applications to transition metal oxides, undoped high-temperature superconductors and actinide oxides are presented, where electronic structures of these materials and other properties derived from electronic structures are calculated and compared with experiments where available. Generally good agreements have been found between theory and experiments. |
