Prominent 5d-orbital contribution to the conduction electrons in gold
Strongly Correlated Electrons
2015-05-18 v1 Materials Science
Abstract
We have examined the valence-band electronic structures of gold and silver in the same column in the periodic table with nominally filled d orbitals by means of a recently developed polarization-dependent hard x-ray photoemission. Contrary to a common expectation, it is found that the 5d-orbital electrons contribute prominently to the conduction electrons in gold while the conduction electrons in silver are to some extent free-electron-like with negligible 4d contribution, which could be related to a well-known fact that gold is more stable than silver in air. The 4d electron correlation effects are found to be essential for the conduction electron character in silver.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1003.3294,
title = {Prominent 5d-orbital contribution to the conduction electrons in gold},
author = {A. Sekiyama and J. Yamaguchi and A. Higashiya and M. Obara and H. Sugiyama and M. Y. Kimura and S. Suga and S. Imada and I. A. Nekrasov and M. Yabashi and K. Tamasaku and T. Ishikawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.3294},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
8 pages, 4 figures, to be appeared in New J. Phys.