The origin of magnetic order in metals has two extremes: an instability in a liquid of local magnetic moments interacting through conduction electrons, and a spin-density wave instability in a Fermi liquid of itinerant electrons. This dichotomy between 'local-moment' magnetism and 'itinerant-electron' magnetism is reminiscent of the valence bond/molecular orbital dichotomy present in studies of chemical bonding. The class of heavy-electron intermetallic compounds of cerium, ytterbium and various 5f elements bridges the extremes, with itinerant-electron magnetic characteristics at low temperatures that grow out of a high-temperature local-moment state. Describing this transition quantitatively has proved difficult, and one of the main unsolved problems is finding what determines the temperature scale for the evolution of this behaviour. Here we present a simple, semi-quantitative solution to this problem that provides a basic framework for interpreting the physics of heavy-electron materials and offers the prospect of a quantitative determination of the physical origin of their magnetic ordering and superconductivity. It also reveals the difference between the temperature scales that distinguish the conduction electrons' response to a single magnetic impurity and their response to a lattice of local moments, and provides an updated version of the well-known Doniach diagram.

The properties of condensed matter are determined by single-particle and collective excitations and their interactions. These quantum-mechanical excitations are characterized by an energy E and a momentum \hbar k which are related through their dispersion E_k. The coupling of two excitations may lead to abrupt changes (kinks) in the slope of the dispersion. Such kinks thus carry important information about interactions in a many-body system. For example, kinks detected at 40-70 meV below the Fermi level in the electronic dispersion of high-temperature superconductors are taken as evidence for phonon or spin-fluctuation based pairing mechanisms. Kinks in the electronic dispersion at binding energies ranging from 30 to 800 meV are also found in various other metals posing questions about their origins. Here we report a novel, purely electronic mechanism yielding kinks in the electron dispersions. It applies to strongly correlated metals whose spectral function shows well separated Hubbard subbands and central peak as, for example, in transition metal-oxides. The position of the kinks and the energy range of validity of Fermi-liquid (FL) theory is determined solely by the FL renormalization factor and the bare, uncorrelated band structure. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiments at binding energies outside the FL regime can thus provide new, previously unexpected information about strongly correlated electronic systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

We propose the parent compound of the newly discovered superconducting nickelate Nd1−xSrxNiO2 as a self-doped Mott insulator, in which the low-density Nd-5d conduction electrons couple to localized Ni-3d x 2 −y 2 electrons to form Kondo spin singlets at low temperatures. This proposal is motivated with our analyses of the reported resistivity and Hall coefficient data in the normal state, showing logarithmic temperature dependence at low temperatures. In the strong Kondo coupling limit, we derive a generalized t-J model with both Kondo singlets and nickel holons moving through the lattice of otherwise nickel spin-1/2 background. The antiferromagnetic longrange order is therefore suppressed as observed in experiments. With Sr-doping, the number of holons on the nickel sites increases, giving rise to the superconductivity and a strange metal phase analogous to those in superconducting copper oxides. *