UCd₁₁ is an antiferromagnetic uranium intermetallic compound (𝑇N=5. 3K) with enhanced electron mass and uranium-uranium spacings nearly twice the Hill limit, suggesting a weakly hybridized 5𝑓 electronic character. Various x-ray spectroscopy techniques indicate that uranium in UCd₁₁ adopts the formal U^3+5𝑓³ configuration, while core-level photoemission spectroscopy (PES) data of UCd₁₁ 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 UCd₁₁, 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 UCd₁₁ is a highly localized uranium 5𝑓³ 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 5𝑓 behavior.
Sundermann et al. (Thu,) studied this question.