The Fano effect in the point contact spectroscopy of heavy electron materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Fano interference in point contact spectroscopy reveals the emergence of the Kondo heavy electron liquid in heavy electron materials, explaining conductance asymmetry and fitting experimental data across multiple compounds.

Contribution

It introduces a simple phenomenological model for Fano interference that accurately describes experimental results and provides insights into heavy quasiparticle lifetimes in heavy electron systems.

Findings

Fano interference explains conductance asymmetry in heavy electron materials.

The phenomenological model fits experimental data for CeCoIn5, CeRhIn5, and YbAl3.

Heavy quasiparticle lifetime estimates agree with numerical calculations.

Abstract

We show that Fano interference explains how point contact spectroscopy in heavy electron materials probes the emergence of the Kondo heavy electron liquid below the same characteristic temperature T* as that seen in many other experiments, and why the resulting measured conductance asymmetry reflects the universal Kondo liquid behavior seen in these. Its physical origin is the opening of a new channel for electron tunneling beyond that available from the background conduction electrons. We propose a simple phenomenological expression for the resulting Fano interference that provides a good fit to the experimental results for CeCoIn$_5$, CeRhIn$_5$ and YbAl$_3$, over the entire range of bias voltages, and deduce a life-time of the heavy quasiparticle excitations that agrees well with recent state-of-the-art numerical calculations.