Pristine quantum criticality in a Kondo semimetal

Abstract

The observation of quantum criticality in diverse classes of strongly correlated electron systems has been instrumental in establishing ordering principles, discovering new phases, and identifying the relevant degrees of freedom and interactions. At focus so far have been insulators and metals. Semimetals, which are of great current interest as candidate phases with nontrivial topology, are much less explored in experiments. Here we study the Kondo semimetal CeRu${}_4$Sn${}_6$ by magnetic susceptibility, specific heat, and inelastic neutron scattering experiments. The power-law divergence of the magnetic Grünesien ratio reveals that, surprisingly, this compound is quantum critical without tuning. The dynamical energy over temperature scaling in the neutron response, seen throughout the Brillouin zone, as well as the temperature dependence of the static uniform susceptibility indicate that temperature is the only energy scale in the criticality. Such behavior, which has been associated with Kondo destruction quantum criticality in metallic systems, may well be generic in the semimetal setting.

arXiv comment16 pages (preprint format), 4 figures; Sci. Adv. 7 (2021) eabf9134

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Flat bands, strange metals, and the Kondo effect
• Controlling electronic topology in a strongly correlated electron system
• Effects of strong correlations on the nonlinear response in Weyl-Kondo semimetals
• Itinerant to relocalized transition of f electrons in the Kondo insulator CeRu4Sn6
• Uniaxial stress effect on the quasi-one-dimensional Kondo lattice CeCo${}_2$Ga${}_8$
• Emergent Topological Semimetal
• Quantum impurity model for two-stage multipolar ordering and Fermi surface reconstruction
• Numerical signatures of ultra-local criticality in a one dimensional Kondo lattice model
• Quantum Fisher information in a strange metal
• The many faces (phases) of strong correlations