Thermodynamic and transport signatures of a fractionalized Fermi liquid
- Creators
- Hackl, Andreas
- Thomale, Ronny
Abstract
Several heavy-fermion metals display a quantum phase transition from an antiferromagnetic metal to a heavy Fermi liquid. In some materials, however, recent experiments seem to find that the heavy Fermi liquid phase can be directly tuned into a non-Fermi liquid phase without apparent magnetic order. We analyze a candidate state for this scenario where the local moment system forms a spin liquid with gapless fermionic excitations. We discuss the thermal conductivity and spin susceptibility of this fractionalized state both in two and, in particular, three spatial dimensions for different temperature regimes. We derive a variational functional for the thermal conductivity and solve it with a variational ansatz dictated by Keldysh formalism. In sufficiently clean samples and for an appropriate temperature window, we find that thermal transport is dominated by the spinon contribution which can be detected by a characteristic maximum in the Wiedemann-Franz ratio. For the spin susceptibility, the conduction electron Pauli paramagnetism is much smaller than the spinon contribution whose temperature dependence in three dimensions is logarithmically enhanced as compared to the Fermi liquid result.
Additional Information
© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 17 January 2011; revised 23 April 2011; published 6 June 2011. We acknowledge discussions with A. Benlagra, S. Friedemann, L. Fritz, P. A. Lee, O. Motrunich, A. Rosch, T. Senthil, and M. Vojta. Furthermore, A.H. thanks M. Vojta for collaborations on related topics. This research was supported by the DFG through SFB 608, SFB-TR/12, and FG 960. A.H. is supported by the David and Ellen Lee Foundation. R.T. is supported by a Feodor Lynen scholarship of the Humboldt Foundation.Attached Files
Published - Hackl2011p14131Phys_Rev_B.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 24045
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20110617-112412088
- SFB 608
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- SFB-TR/12
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- FG 960
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
- David and Ellen Lee Foundation
- Humboldt Foundation Feodor Lynen Scholarship
- Created
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2011-06-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field