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Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 216602 (2005) [4 pages]

Heat Transport as a Probe of Electron Scattering by Spin Fluctuations: The Case of Antiferromagnetic CeRhIn5

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Johnpierre Paglione1,*, M. A. Tanatar1,†, D. G. Hawthorn1,‡, R. W. Hill1,§, F. Ronning1,**, M. Sutherland1,††, Louis Taillefer1,2,3,‡‡, C. Petrovic4, and P. C. Canfield5
1Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2Département de physique et Regroupement québécois sur les matériaux de pointe, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
3Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
4Department of Physics, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA
5Ames Laboratory and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011, USA

Received 7 April 2004; published 3 June 2005

Heat and charge conduction were measured in the heavy-fermion metal CeRhIn5, an antiferromagnet with TN=3.8  K. The thermal resistivity is found to be proportional to the magnetic entropy, revealing that spin fluctuations are as effective in scattering electrons as they are in disordering local moments. The electrical resistivity, governed by a q2 weighting of fluctuations, increases monotonically with temperature. In contrast, the difference between thermal and electrical resistivities, characterized by a ω2 weighting, peaks sharply at TN and eventually goes to zero at a temperature T⋆≃8  K. T⋆ thus emerges as a measure of the characteristic energy of magnetic fluctuations.

© 2005 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.216602
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.216602
PACS:
72.15.Eb, 71.27.+a, 72.15.Qm, 75.30.Kz

*Current address: Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA.

†Permanent address: Inst. Surface Chemistry, N.A.S. Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine.

‡Current address: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

§Current address: Department of Physics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada.

**Current address: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM.

††Current address: Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

‡‡Electronic address: Louis.Taillefer@USherbrooke.ca

 
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