Low-temperature electrical resistivity in paramagnetic spinel LiV2O4

TL;DR

This paper models the low-temperature electrical resistivity of LiV2O4, a heavy fermion spinel, by considering impurity and spin-fluctuation scattering mechanisms within the SCR theory framework, explaining its Fermi liquid behavior and deviations at higher temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical calculation of resistivity in LiV2O4 considering both impurity and spin-fluctuation scattering, extending SCR theory to explain experimental resistivity behavior.

Findings

Resistivity shows Fermi liquid behavior at low T

Deviations from Fermi liquid behavior at higher T are explained

Spin fluctuations significantly influence resistivity properties

Abstract

The 3d electron spinel compound LiV2O4 exhibits heavy fermion behaviour below 30K which is related to antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations strongly enhanced in an extended region of momentum space. This mechanism explains enhanced thermodynamic quantities and nearly critical NMR relaxation in the framework of the selfconsistent renormalization (SCR) theory. Here we show that the low-T Fermi liquid behaviour of the resistivity and a deviation from this behavior for higher T may also be understood within that context. We calculate the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity \rho(T) assuming that two basic mechanisms of the quasiparticle scattering, resulting from impurities and spin-fluctuations, operate simultaneously at low temperature. The calculation is based on the variational principle in the form of a perturbative series expansion for \rho(T). A peculiar behavior of \rho(T) in LiV2O4 is related to properties of low-energy spin fluctuations whose T-dependence is obtained from SCR theory.