Universal Behavior in Heavy-Electron Materials

We present our finding that an especially simple scaling expression describes the formation of a new state of quantum matter, the Kondo Fermi liquid (KL) in heavy-electron materials. Emerging at $T^{*}$ as a result of the collective coherent hybridization of localized $f$ electrons and conduction electrons, the KL possesses a non-Landau density of states varying as $(1-T/T^{*}{)}^{3/2}[1+\ln (T^{*}/T)]$. We show that four independent experimental probes verify this scaling behavior and that for ${\mathrm{CeIrIn}}_5$ the KL state density is in excellent agreement with the recent microscopic calculations.

Figure 1

Scaling behavior of the anomalous Knight shift for Ce-115 and some other heavy-electron materials (data from Refs. 13 and references in Ref. 3 ).

Figure 2

Scaling behavior of the anomalous Hall coefficient for (a) Ce-115 materials [5, 7] and (b) ${\mathrm{Ce}}_{1-x}{\mathrm{La}}_x{\mathrm{CoIn}}_5$ [8].

Figure 3

Point-contact conductance asymmetry of ${\mathrm{CeCoIn}}_5$ [10] compared to its $c$-axis KS anomaly and the universal density of states of the Kondo liquid.

Figure 4

Fano asymmetry parameter $|q{|}^{-1}$ from the Raman spectra of ${\mathrm{CeCoIn}}_5$ [12] compared to the Kondo liquid density of states.

Figure 5

$\mathrm{LDA}+\mathrm{DMFT}$ density of states of the quasiparticles in ${\mathrm{CeIrIn}}_5$ [4] compared to the KL density of states. We take the onset temperature $T^{*}=31\mathrm{K}$ from the Hall anomaly.