Fermionology in the Kondo-Heisenberg model: the case of CeCoIn 5

The Fermi surface of heavy electron systems plays a fundamental role in understanding their variety of puzzling phenomena, for example, quantum criticality, strange metal behavior, unconventional superconductivity and even enigmatic phases with yet unknown order parameters. The spectroscopy measurement of the typical heavy fermion superconductor CeCoIn 5 has demonstrated multi-Fermi surface structure, which has not been studied in detail theoretically in a model system like the Kondo-Heisenberg model. In this work, we take a step toward such a theoretical model by revisiting the Kondo-Heisenberg model. It is found that the usual self-consistent calculation cannot reproduce the fermionology of the experimental observation of the system due to the sign binding between the hopping of the conduction electrons and the mean-field valence-bond order. To overcome such inconsistency, the mean-field valence-bond order is considered as a free/fitting parameter to correlate them with real-life experiments as performed in recent experiments [M.P. Allan, F. Massee, D.K. Morr, J. Van Dyke, A.W. Rost, A.P. Mackenzie, C. Petrovic, J.C. Davis, Nat. Phys. 9, 468 (2013); J. Van Dyke, F. Massee, M.P. Allan, J.C. Davis, C. Petrovic, D.K. Morr, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 111, 11663 (2014)], which also explicitly reflects the intrinsic dispersion of local electrons observed in experimental measurements. Given the fermionology, the calculated effective mass enhancement, entropy, superfluid density and Knight shift are all in qualitative agreement with the experimental results of CeCoIn 5 , which confirms our assumption. Our result supports a $$d_{x^2 - y^2 }$$ -wave pairing structure in the heavy fermion material CeCoIn 5 . Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015