Magnetic susceptibility, heat capacity, and electrical resistivity measurements have been carried out on single crystals of the intermediate valence compounds Yb2Rh3Ga9 and Yb2Ir3Ga9. These measurements reveal a large anisotropy due apparently to an interplay between crystalline electric field (CEF) and Kondo effects. The temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibility can be modelled using the Anderson impurity model including CEF within an approach based on the NonCrossing Approximation.PACS numbers: 75.30.Mb,75.20.Hr,71.27.+a,71.28.+d The intermediate valence compounds pose one of the most challenging problems of strongly correlated electron systems. Different ingredients contribute to the complexity of these fascinating systems: the presence of strong Kondo interactions, the level structure of the crystal electric field (CEF) f -orbitals, the different hybridizations between each level and the conduction band, and the eventual coherence effects and magnetic interactions introduced by the periodicity of the Kondo lattice.
1Strong valence fluctuations are observed in the intermetallic compounds with Ce, Yb and U. In particular, Yb compounds attract a great deal of interest because the trivalent Yb ion is at least in some sense the hole counterpart of the Ce 3+ ion which has one electron in its 4f shell. As in the case of the Ce compounds, 2 the Ybbased intermetallics exhibit a diversity of physical properties that remain to be understood.
3The isostructural series of compounds R 2 M 3 X 9 (R = La, Ce, Yb, U; M=Co, Rh, Ir; X = Al, Ga) exhibit antiferromagnetic ordering for R=Yb, X=Al, and mixedvalence behavior for R=Ce,Yb and X=Ga. 4,5,6,7 All the U-based compounds order antiferromagnetically at temperatures below 40 K.4 The Yb 2 M 3 Ga 9 compounds are a suitable class of materials for studying the difference in the electronic structure between the magnetically ordered Kondo lattice and the mixed-valence systems. The orientation-dependent temperature T max of the maximum in the magnetic susceptibility suggests the possibility of an anisotropic Kondo effect.8,9 Previously, Petrovic et al. studied ternary R-Ir-Ga compounds (R=rare earth) that were assigned the RIr 2 Ga stoichiometry in their work. 10,11,12 Elemental analysis studies unavailable to these previous authors suggest that R 2 Ir 3 Ga 9 is the correct stoichiometry of these materials instead. The R 2 Ir 3 Ga 9 compounds with Ce and Yb show reduced magnetic moments and the absence of magnetic order above 0.04 K.
11The thermodynamic properties of the single-impurity model have been calculated exactly using the Betheansatz technique, 14,15,16,17,18 and also approximately within the Non-Crossing Approximation (NCA), which shows good agreement with the former.19 However, to the best of our knowledge, it has always been assumed that the hybridization V m between any state of the magnetic configuration |m and the conduction electrons is independent of m even when the CEF is included.14,15,16 This is a requirement for the integrability of the problem; 20 a...