Resistivity and Thermal Conductivity of an Organic Insulator beta'-EtMe3Sb[Pd(dmit)2]2

TL;DR

This study investigates how cooling rates affect thermal conductivity and resistivity in the organic insulator beta'-EtMe3Sb[Pd(dmit)2]2, revealing disorder-related effects on low-temperature heat transport without influencing high-temperature electrical resistivity.

Contribution

It demonstrates that low-temperature thermal conductivity in this QSL candidate is sensitive to disorder and cooling rate, while resistivity remains unaffected, highlighting the importance of disorder length scales.

Findings

Finite residual thermal conductivity depends on cooling rate.

High-temperature resistivity is independent of cooling rate.

Disorder length scales influence low-temperature heat transport.

Abstract

A finite residual linear term in the thermal conductivity at zero temperature in insulating magnets indicates the presence of gapless excitations of itinerant quasiparticles, which has been observed in some candidate materials of quantum spin liquids (QSLs). In the organic triangular insulator beta'-EtMe3Sb[Pd(dmit)2]2, a QSL candidate material, the low-temperature thermal conductivity depends on the cooling process and the finite residual term is observed only in samples with large thermal conductivity. Moreover, the cooling rate dependence is largely sample dependent. Here we find that, while the low-temperature thermal conductivity significantly depends on the cooling rate, the high-temperature resistivity is almost perfectly independent of the cooling rate. These results indicate that in the samples with the finite residual term, the mean free path of the quasiparticles that carry the heat at low temperatures is governed by disorders, whose characteristic length scale of the distribution is much longer than the electron mean free path that determines the high-temperature resistivity. This explains why recent X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance measurements show no cooling rate dependence. Naturally, these measurements are unsuitable for detecting disorders of the length scale relevant for the thermal conductivity, just as they cannot determine the residual resistivity of metals. Present results indicate that very careful experiments are needed when discussing itinerant spin excitations in beta'-EtMe3Sb[Pd(dmit)2]2.