General rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: http://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. We present a detailed temperature and frequency dependence of the optical conductivity measured on clean high-quality single crystals of URu 2 Si 2 of ac-and ab-plane surfaces. Our data demonstrate the itinerant character of the narrow 5f bands, becoming progressively coherent as the temperature is lowered below a crossover temperature T * ∼ 75 K. T * is higher than in previous reports as a result of a different sample preparation, which minimizes residual strain. We furthermore present the density-response (energy-loss) function of this compound, and determine the energies of the heavy-fermion plasmons with a-and c-axis polarization. Our observation of a suppression of optical conductivity below 50 meV along both the a and c axes, along with a heavy-fermion plasmon at 18 meV, points toward the emergence of a band of coherent charge carriers crossing the Fermi energy and the emergence of a hybridization gap on part of the Fermi surface. The evolution towards coherent itinerant states is accelerated below the hidden order temperature T HO = 17.5 K. In the hidden order phase the low-frequency optical conductivity shows a single gap at ∼6.5 meV, which closes at T HO .

We studied the in-plane dynamic and static charge conductivity of electron doped Sr 2 IrO 4 using optical spectroscopy and DC transport measurements. The optical conductivity indicates that the pristine material is an indirect semiconductor with a direct Mott gap of 0.55 eV. Upon substitution of 2% La per formula unit the Mott gap is suppressed except in a small fraction of the material (15%) where the gap survives, and overall the material remains insulating. Instead of a zero energy mode (or Drude peak) we observe a soft collective mode (SCM) with a broad maximum at 40 meV. Doping to 10% increases the strength of the SCM, and a zero-energy mode occurs together with metallic DC conductivity. Further increase of the La substitution doesn't change the spectral weight integral up to 3 eV. It does however result in a transfer of the SCM spectral weight to the zero-energy mode, with a corresponding reduction of the DC resistivity for all temperatures from 4 to 300 K. The presence of a zero-energy mode signals that at least part of the Fermi surface remains ungapped at low temperatures, whereas the SCM appears to be caused by pinning a collective frozen state involving part of the doped electrons.

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