Abstract
Recent computational work evaluated the phase stability of UCo2 and UNi2 in the C14, C15, and C36 Laves phases and reported their computationally determined phonon density of states. To corroborate these computational findings, we report the experimentally determined phonon density of states for UCo2 and UNi2 using inelastic neutron scattering at the wide angular-range chopper spectrometer at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We found excellent agreement between experimental and computational results for UNi2 and noted that some differences were observed for UCo2. By comparing the phonon density of states of UCo2 with that of other U-bearing Laves phases, we found that UCo2 showed distinct vibrational properties. From the one-phonon density of states, we calculated the lattice contribution to the specific heat of UNi2 and UCo2. Finally, we bound the electronic contribution to the specific heat in UNi2.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 054302 |
| Journal | Physical Review B |
| Volume | 112 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2025 |
Funding
The authors thank A. May for insightful discussion of the manuscript. A portion of this research used resources at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The beam time was allocated to ARCS on Proposals No. IPTS-32884 and No. IPTS-25091. This research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This work has been partially supported by U.S. DOE Grant No. DE-FG02-13ER41967.ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan [41].