Giant Anisotropic Magnetoresistance due to Purely Orbital Rearrangement in the Quadrupolar Heavy Fermion Superconductor PrV${}_2$Al${}_{20}$

Abstract

We report the discovery of giant and anisotropic magnetoresistance due to the orbital rearrangement in a non-magnetic correlated metal. In particular, we measured the magnetoresistance under fields up to 31.4 T in the cubic Pr-based heavy fermion superconductor PrV${}_2$Al${}_{20}$ with a non-magnetic $\hat{I}{“}_3$ doublet ground state, exhibiting antiferro-quadrupole ordering below 0.7 K. For the [100] direction, we find that the high-field phase appears between 12 T and 25 T, accompanied by a large jump at 12 T in the magnetoresistance ($\hat{I}”MR\sim$ 100 $\%$) and in the anisotropic magnetoresistivity (AMR) ratio by $\sim$ 20 $\%$. These observations indicate that the strong hybridization between the conduction electrons and anisotropic quadrupole moments leads to the Fermi surface reconstruction upon crossing the field-induced antiferro-quadrupole (orbital) rearrangement.

5 pages, 3 figures