English

Pressure dependent intermediate valence behavior in YbNiGa$_{4}$ and YbNiIn$_{4}$

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2019-01-30 v1

Abstract

We report a comprehensive structural and valence study of the intermediate valent materials YbNiGa4_{4} and YbNiIn4_{4} under pressures up to 60 GPa. YbNiGa4_{4} undergoes a smooth volume contraction and shows steady increase in Yb-valence with pressure, though the Yb-valence reaches saturation around 25 GPa. In YbNiIn4_{4}, a change in pressure dependence of the volume and a peak in Yb-valence suggest a pressure induced electronic topological transition occurs around 10-14 GPa. In the pressure region where YbNiIn4_{4} and YbNiGa4_{4} possess similar Yb-Yb spacings the Yb-valence reveals a precipitous drop. This drop is not captured by density-functional-theory calculations and implies that both the lattice degrees of freedom and the chemical environment play an important role in establishing the valence of Yb.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.06074,
  title  = {Pressure dependent intermediate valence behavior in YbNiGa$_{4}$ and YbNiIn$_{4}$},
  author = {Z. E. Brubaker and R. L. Stillwell and P. Chow and Y. Xiao and C. Kenney-Benson and R. Ferry and D. Popov and S. B. Donald and P. Söderlind and D. J. Campbell and J. Paglione and K. Huang and R. E. Baumbach and R. J. Zieve and J. R. Jeffries},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.06074},
  year   = {2019}
}