Abstract
The layered rare-earth diantimonides are anisotropic metals with generally low electronic densities whose properties can be modified by substituting the rare earth. is a nonmagnetic metal with a low residual resistivity presenting a low-temperature magnetoresistance that does not saturate with the magnetic field. It has been proposed that the latter can be associated to a charge density wave (CDW), but no CDW has yet been found. Here we find a kink in the resistivity above room temperature in (at 355 K) and show that the kink becomes much more pronounced with substitution of La by Ce along the series. We find signatures of a CDW in x-ray scattering, specific heat, and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments in particular for . We observe a distortion of rare-earth–Sb bonds lying in-plane of the tetragonal crystal using x-ray scattering, an anomaly in the specific heat at the same temperature as the kink in resistivity and charge modulations in STM. We conclude that has a CDW which is stabilized in the series due to substitutional disorder.
2 More- Received 9 December 2014
- Revised 15 October 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.235153
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