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Non-Fermi-liquid behaviour in La4Ru6O19

Abstract

Understanding the complexities of electronic and magnetic ground states in solids is one of the main goals of solid-state physics. Transition-metal oxides have proved to be particularly fruitful in this regard, especially for those materials with the perovskite structure, where the special characteristics of transition-metal–oxygen orbital hybridization determine their properties. Ruthenates have recently emerged as an important family of perovskites because of the unexpected evolution from high-temperature ferromagnetism in SrRuO3 to low-temperature superconductivity in Sr2RuO4 (refs 1, 2). Here we show that a ruthenate in a different structural family, La4Ru6O19, displays a number of highly unusual properties, most notably non-Fermi-liquid behaviour. The properties of La4Ru6O19 have no analogy among the thousands of previously characterized transition-metal oxides. Instead, they resemble those of CeCu6-xAux—a widely studied f-electron-based heavy fermion intermetallic compound that is often considered as providing the best example of non-Fermi-liquid behaviour. In the ruthenate, non-Fermi-liquid behaviour appears to arise from just the right balance between the interactions of localized electronic states derived from Ru–Ru bonding and delocalized states derived from Ru–O hybridization.

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Figure 1: Two crystallographic unit cells of La4Ru6O19 nd La3Ru3O11.
Figure 2: Temperature-dependent resistivity measurements.
Figure 3: Magnetic susceptibility measurements.
Figure 4: Low-angle powder neutron diffraction data for La4Ru6O19 at 298 K and 25 K indicating the absence of three-dimensional magnetic ordering at low temperatures.
Figure 5: The specific heat data for La4Ru6O19 corrected for nuclear Shottky anomalies (the inset shows raw data).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. Zadorozhny and L.-N. Zou for help with the low-temperature transport measurements, and Z. Soos and J. Willson for helpful discussions on metal–metal bonding. The work at Princeton University and Pennsylvania State University was supported by the US National Science Foundation.

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Correspondence to R. J. Cava.

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Khalifah, P., Nelson, K., Jin, R. et al. Non-Fermi-liquid behaviour in La4Ru6O19. Nature 411, 669–671 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35079534

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