Search for: All records

Abstract Kondo lattice materials, where localized magnetic moments couple to itinerant electrons, provide a very rich backdrop for strong electron correlations. They are known to realize many exotic phenomena, with a dramatic example being recent observations of quantum oscillations and metallic thermal conduction in insulators, implying the emergence of enigmatic charge-neutral fermions. Here, we show that thermal conductivity and specific heat measurements in insulating YbIr 3 Si 7 reveal emergent neutral excitations, whose properties are sensitively changed by a field-driven transition between two antiferromagnetic phases. In the low-field phase, a significant violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law demonstrates that YbIr 3 Si 7 is a charge insulator but a thermal metal. In the high-field phase, thermal conductivity exhibits a sharp drop below 300 mK, indicating a transition from a thermal metal into an insulator/semimetal driven by the magnetic transition. These results suggest that spin degrees of freedom directly couple to the neutral fermions, whose emergent Fermi surface undergoes a field-driven instability at low temperatures. 

The recently discovered kagome superconductorsAV₃Sb₅(A= K, Rb, Cs) exhibit unusual charge-density-wave (CDW) orders with time-reversal and rotational symmetry breaking. One of the most crucial unresolved issues is identifying the symmetry of the superconductivity that develops inside the CDW phase. Theory predicts a variety of unconventional superconducting symmetries with sign-changing and chiral order parameters. Experimentally, however, superconducting phase information inAV₃Sb₅is still lacking. Here we report the impurity effects in CsV₃Sb₅using electron irradiation as a phase-sensitive probe of superconductivity. Our magnetic penetration depth measurements reveal that with increasing impurities, an anisotropic fully-gapped state changes to an isotropic full-gap state without passing through a nodal state. Furthermore, transport measurements under pressure show that the double superconducting dome in the pressure-temperature phase diagram survives against sufficient impurities. These results support that CsV₃Sb₅is a non-chiral, anisotropics-wave superconductor with no sign change both at ambient and under pressure.