Theory of nuclear quadrupole interaction in cadmium using a first-principles pseudopotential

Abstract

The field gradient in cadmium metal is calculated using a first-principles pseudopotential and including antishielding effects for the conduction electrons in an ab initio manner. The calculated field gradient in combination with the quadrupole coupling constant from perturbed-angular-correlation measurements leads to a quadrupole moment of 0.71 barns in good agreement with an earlier value obtained using an adaptation to other energies of an empirical pseudopotential derived from Fermi-surface data and in reasonable agreement with 0.77 barns from ionic crystal data. These results testify to both the importance of antishielding effects for conduction electrons and the reasonableness of the pseudopotential procedure used earlier.