We report the discovery of superconductivity in pressurized CeRhGe3, until now the only remaining non-superconducting member of the isostructural family of non-centrosymmetric heavy-fermion compounds CeTX3 (T = Co, Rh, Ir and X = Si, Ge). Superconductivity appears in CeRhGe3 at a pressure of 19.6 GPa and the transition temperature Tc reaches a maximum value of 1.3 K at 21.5 GPa. This finding provides an opportunity to establish systematic correlations between superconductivity and materials properties within this family. Though ambient-pressure unit-cell volumes and critical pressures for superconductivity vary substantially across the series, all family members reach a maximum Tcmax at a common critical cell volume Vcrit, and Tcmax at Vcrit increases with increasing spin-orbit coupling strength of the d-electrons. These correlations show that substantial Kondo hybridization and spin-orbit coupling favor superconductivity in this family, the latter reflecting the role of broken centro-symmetry.
@article{arxiv.1708.05837,
title = {Superconductivity in pressurized CeRhGe3 and related non-centrosymmetric compounds},
author = {Honghong Wang and Jing Guo and Eric D. Bauer and Vladimir A Sidorov and Hengcan Zhao and Jiahao Zhang and Yazhou Zhou and Zhe Wang and Shu Cai and Ke Yang and Aiguo Li and Xiaodong Li and Yanchun Li and Peijie Sun and Yi-feng Yang and Qi Wu and Tao Xiang and J. D. Thompson and Liling Sun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.05837},
year = {2018}
}