Abstract
Complex electronic matter shows subtle forms of self-organization, which are almost invisible to the available experimental tools. One prominent example is provided by the heavy-fermion material URu2Si2. At high temperature, the 5f electrons of uranium carry a very large entropy. This entropy is released at 17.5 K by means of a second-order phase transition1 to a state that remains shrouded in mystery, termed a ‘hidden order’ state2. Here, we develop a first-principles theoretical method to analyse the electronic spectrum of correlated materials as a function of the position inside the unit cell of the crystal and use it to identify the low-energy excitations of URu2Si2. We identify the order parameter of the hidden-order state and show that it is intimately connected to magnetism. Below 70 K, the 5f electrons undergo a multichannel Kondo effect, which is ‘arrested’ at low temperature by the crystal-field splitting. At lower temperatures, two broken-symmetry states emerge, characterized by a complex order parameter ψ. A real ψ describes the hidden-order phase and an imaginary ψ corresponds to the large-moment antiferromagnetic phase. Together, they provide a unified picture of the two broken-symmetry phases in this material.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to J. Allen, J. Denlinger and J.C. Seamus Davis for fruitful discussion and for sharing unpublished work with us. K.H. was supported by grant NSF DMR-0746395 and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship. G.K. was supported by NSF DMR-0906943.
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K.H. and G.K. both developed the LDA+DMFT methodology and the physical interpretation of the results.
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Haule, K., Kotliar, G. Arrested Kondo effect and hidden order in URu2Si2. Nature Phys 5, 796–799 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1392
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1392
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