Electronic Correlations in Nickelate Analogues of Cuprate Superconductors

Motivated by recent experiments on tri-layer (Pr4Ni3O8) and infinite layer (NdNiO2) analogues of cuprate superconductors, we use a combination of density functional and dynamical mean field (DFT+DMFT) methods to perform a comparative study of the metal-insulator and magnetic phase diagrams, many body electronic structure, and conduction band many-body mass enhancements of cuprate and nickelate materials. In the Ni materials the transition metal d-bands are more widely separated in energy from the O-p bands than in the cuprates, suggesting that the nickelates are more accurately modelled by a Hubbard model than are the cuprates. The role of Nd-derived d-bands in the physics of the nickelates is discussed and the possibility that in the nickelate case other Ni-d orbitals may be relevant is analyzed. Preliminary results on superconductivity within the DMFT approximation will be presented.