Spin-density wave in Cr: Nesting versus low-lying thermal excitations

It is well known that present versions of density functional theory do not predict the experimentally observed spin-density wave state to be the ground state of Cr. Recently, a so-called “nodon model” has been proposed as an alternative way to reconcile theory and experiment: the ground state of Cr is truly antiferromagnetic, and the spin-density wave appears due to low-lying thermal excitations (“nodons”). We examine in this paper whether the postulated properties of these nodons are reproduced by ab initio calculations.