Hybridization gap in heavy fermion compounds

S V Dordevic; D N Basov; N R Dilley; E D Bauer; M B Maple

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.684

Hybridization gap in heavy fermion compounds

Phys Rev Lett. 2001 Jan 22;86(4):684-7. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.684.

Authors

S V Dordevic¹, D N Basov, N R Dilley, E D Bauer, M B Maple

Affiliation

¹ Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.

PMID: 11177912
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.684

Abstract

We report the results of optical studies of new heavy fermion compounds YbFe(4)Sb(12) and CeRu(4)Sb(12). We show that these compounds, as well as several other heavy fermion materials with a nonmagnetic ground state, obey a universal scaling relationship between the quasiparticle effective mass m(*) and the magnitude of the energy gap Delta in the excitation spectrum. This result is in accord with the picture of hybridization of localized f-electron and free carrier states.