A microscopic Kondo lattice model for the heavy fermion antiferromagnet CeIn$_3$

TL;DR

This paper develops a simplified Kondo-Heisenberg model for CeIn$_3$ from a complex multi-orbital Anderson model, validated by neutron spectroscopy, advancing understanding of heavy fermion quantum states and unconventional superconductivity.

Contribution

It introduces a reduced, accurate Kondo-Heisenberg model for CeIn$_3$ derived from ab initio calculations, enabling better theoretical understanding of heavy fermion materials.

Findings

The model accurately reproduces magnetic soft modes in CeIn$_3$.

The approach links electronic structure to magnetic interactions.

It provides a pathway to understand unconventional superconductivity.

Abstract

Electrons at the border of localization generate exotic states of matter across all classes of strongly correlated electron materials and many other quantum materials with emergent functionality. Heavy electron metals are a model example, in which magnetic interactions arise from the opposing limits of localized and itinerant electrons. This remarkable duality is intimately related to the emergence of a plethora of novel quantum matter states such as unconventional superconductivity, electronic-nematic states, hidden order and most recently topological states of matter such as topological Kondo insulators and Kondo semimetals and putative chiral superconductors. The outstanding challenge is that the archetypal Kondo lattice model that captures the underlying electronic dichotomy is notoriously difficult to solve for real materials. Here we show, using the prototypical strongly-correlated antiferromagnet CeIn$_3$, that a multi-orbital periodic Anderson model embedded with input from ab initio bandstructure calculations can be reduced to a simple Kondo-Heisenberg model, which captures the magnetic interactions quantitatively. We validate this tractable Hamiltonian via high-resolution neutron spectroscopy that reproduces accurately the magnetic soft modes in CeIn$_3$, which are believed to mediate unconventional superconductivity. Our study paves the way for a quantitative understanding of metallic quantum states such as unconventional superconductivity.