Optical gyrotropy in quadrupolar Kondo systems

Abstract

Recent experiments point to a variety of intermetallic systems which exhibit exotic quadrupolar orders driven by the Kondo coupling between conduction electrons and localized quadrupolar degrees of freedom. Using a Luttinger k.p Hamiltonian for the conduction electrons, we study the impact of such quadrupolar order on their energies and wave functions. We discover that such quadrupolar orders can induce a nontrivial Berry curvature for the conduction electron bands, leading to a nonvanishing optical gyrotropic effect. We estimate the magnitude of the gyrotropic response in a candidate quadrupolar material, PrPb3, and discuss the resulting Faraday rotation in thin films.

4+ pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Heavy Fermions and Quantum Phase Transitions
• High Resolution Polar Kerr Effect Measurements of Sr2RuO4: Evidence for Broken Time Reversal Symmetry in the Superconducting State
• Polar Kerr Effect Measurements of YBa2Cu3O6+x: Evidence for Broken Symmetry Near the Pseudogap Temperature
• Hastatic Order in URu2Si2
• Kerr effect as evidence of gyrotropic order in the cuprates
• Berry phase mechanism for optical gyrotropy in stripe-ordered cuprates