Publication Date:
2005-07-05
Description:
Curium lies at the center of the actinide series and has a half-filled shell with seven 5f electrons spatially residing inside its radon core. As a function of pressure, curium exhibits five different crystallographic phases up to 100 gigapascals, of which all but one are also found in the preceding element, americium. We describe here a structure in curium, Cm III, with monoclinic symmetry, space group C2/c, found at intermediate pressures (between 37 and 56 gigapascals). Ab initio electronic structure calculations agree with the observed sequence of structures and establish that it is the spin polarization of curium's 5f electrons that stabilizes Cm III. The results reveal that curium is one of a few elements that has a lattice structure stabilized by magnetism.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Heathman, S -- Haire, R G -- Le Bihan, T -- Lindbaum, A -- Idiri, M -- Normile, P -- Li, S -- Ahuja, R -- Johansson, B -- Lander, G H -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2005 Jul 1;309(5731):110-3.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Transuranium Elements, Postfach 2340, D-76125, Karlsruhe, Germany. heathman@itu.fzk.de〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15994550" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
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Chemistry and Pharmacology
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Computer Science
,
Medicine
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Natural Sciences in General
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Physics
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