Materials with correlated electrons often respond very strongly to external or internal influences, leading to instabilities and states of matter with broken symmetry. This behavior can be studied theoretically either by evaluating the linear response characteristics, or by simulating the ordered phases of the materials under investigation. We developed the necessary tools within the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) to search for electronic instabilities in materials close to spin-state crossovers and to analyze the properties of the corresponding ordered states. This investigation, motivated by the physics of LaCoO3, led to a discovery of condensation of spinful excitons in the two-orbital Hubbard model with a surprisingly rich phase diagram. The results are reviewed in the first part of the article. Electronic correlations can also be the driving force behind structural transformations of materials. To be able to investigate correlation-induced phase instabilities we developed and implemented a formalism for the computation of total energies and forces within a fully charge self-consistent combination of density functional theory and DMFT. Applications of this scheme to the study of structural instabilities of selected correlated electron materials such as Fe and FeSe are reviewed in the second part of the paper.

Hole and electron doped LaCoO3 is studied using dynamical mean-field theory. The one-particle spectra are analyzed and compared to the available experimental data, in particular the x-ray absorption spectra. Analyzing the temporal spin-spin correlation functions we find the atomic intermediate spin state is not important for the observed Curie-Weiss susceptibility. Contrary to the commonly held view about the roles played by the t2g and eg electrons we find narrow quasiparticle bands of t2g character crossing the Fermi level accompanied by strongly damped eg excitations.

We study the single-impurity Anderson model with diagrammatic techniques. We employ the parquet approach to determine the electron-hole and electron-electron irreducible vertices self-consistently. We demonstrate that when the dominant contributions front the critical region of the singularity driven by multiple electron-hole scatterings are properly taken into account we make the parquet equations soluble and recover the Kondo asymptotics in the symmetric as well as in the asymmetric cases.

We present an analytic universal impurity solver for strongly correlated electrons. We extend the many-body perturbation expansion via suitable two-particle renormalizations from the Fermi-liquid regime to the critical region of the metal-insulator transition. The reliability of the approximation in the strong-coupling limit is demonstrated by reproducing the Kondo scale in the single-impurity Anderson model. We disclose the origin of the Kondo resonance in terms of Feynman diagrams and find criteria for the existence of the proper Kondo asymptotic behavior in approximate theories.