2007/05/31 by Johnpierre Paglione, T. A. Sayles, P. -C. Ho +4 · 1 citation
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Iron-based superconductors research #Magnetic Properties of Alloys #Rare-earth and actinide compounds #cond-mat.str-el #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nphys711
published as Nature Physics 3, 703 (2007) · 4 pages, 3 figures (published version)
openalex publication_date 2007/09/09 · arxiv created 2008/03/18 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
One of the most notorious non-Fermi liquid properties of both archetypal heavy-fermion systems [1-4] and the high-Tc copper oxide superconductors [5] is an electrical resistivity that evolves linearly with temperature, T. In the heavy-fermion superconductor CeCoIn5 [5], this linear behaviour was one of the first indications of the presence of a zero-temperature instability, or quantum critical point. Here, we report the observation of a unique control parameter of T-linear scattering in CeCoIn5, found through systematic chemical substitutions of both magnetic and non-magnetic rare-earth, R, ions into the Ce sub-lattice. We find that the evolution of inelastic scattering in Ce1-xRxCoIn5 is strongly dependent on the f-electron configuration of the R ion, whereas two other key properties -- Cooper-pair breaking and Kondo-lattice coherence -- are not. Thus, T-linear resistivity in CeCoIn5 is intimately related to the nature of incoherent scattering centers in the Kondo lattice, which provides insight into the anomalous scattering rate synonymous with quantum criticality [7].