Correlation between ground state and orbital anisotropy in heavy fermion materials.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 25675488.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.1415657112 and PMC identifier 4345558.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
The interplay of structural, orbital, charge, and spin degrees of freedom is at the heart of many emergent phenomena, including superconductivity. Unraveling the underlying forces of such novel phases is a great challenge because it not only requires understanding each of these degrees of freedom, it also involves accounting for the interplay between them. Cerium-based heavy fermion compounds are an ideal playground for investigating these interdependencies, and we present evidence for a correlation between orbital anisotropy and the ground states in a representative family of materials. We have measured the 4f crystal-electric field ground-state wave functions of the strongly correlated materials CeRh1-xIrxIn5 with great accuracy using linear polarization-dependent soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy. These measurements show that these wave functions correlate with the ground-state properties of the substitution series, which covers long-range antiferromagnetic order, unconventional superconductivity, and coexistence of these two states.