Quantum criticality and the suppression of the heavy fermion state in UBe₁₃ by high magnetic fields

Abstract

We have measured the electrical resistivity of a single crystal of UBe₁₃ below 1 K and in high magnetic fields to 33 T. The resistivity exhibits the T ² dependence characteristic of a Fermi liquid at low temperatures. The field dependence of the coefficient of the T ² term in the resistivity suggests that the heavy fermion state is suppressed by high magnetic fields. We discuss these results in light of a proposed field-induced quantum critical point immersed in the novel superconducting state of this compound.

Keywords:

• heavy fermions
• resistivity
• superconductivity
• non-Fermi liquid
• quantum critical point

Acknowledgements

With this paper the authors celebrate two decades of collaborative work on the physics of strongly correlated electron systems and look forward to the next two decades. We are grateful to Eric Palm, Tim Murphy, and Scott Hannahs of the NHMFL in Tallahassee for their assistance. One of the authors (JLS) apologizes to the authors of 15 for failing to see the importance of their work when it was submitted to a prestigious journal late in 1985. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under DMR-0704406. Work at Los Alamos was performed under the auspices of the US DOE. The experiment was performed at the NHMFL, which is supported by NSF Cooperative Agreement No. DMR-0654118 and by the State of Florida.