Kondo scenario of the γ–α phase transition in single crystalline cerium thin films

Abstract The physical mechanism driving the γ–α phase transition of face-centre-cubic (fcc) cerium (Ce) remains controversial until now. In this work, high-quality single crystalline fcc–Ce thin films were grown on Graphene/6H-SiC(0001) substrate, and explored by XRD and ARPES measurement. XRD spectra showed a clear γ–α phase transition at T_γ−α ≈ 50 K, which is retarded by strain effect from substrate comparing with T_γ−α (about 140 K) of the bulk Ce metal. However, APRES spectra did not show any signature of α-phase emerging in the surface-layer from 300 to 17 K, which implied that α-phase might form at the bulk-layer of our Ce thin films. Besides, an evident Kondo dip near Fermi energy was observed in the APRES spectrum at 80 K, indicting the formation of Kondo singlet states in γ–Ce. Furthermore, the DFT + DMFT calculations were performed to simulate the electronic structures and the theoretical spectral functions agreed well with the experimental ARPES spectra. In γ–Ce, the behavior of the self-energy’s imaginary part at low frequency not only confirmed that the Kondo singlet states emerged at T_KS ≥ 80 K, but also implied that they became coherent states at a lower characteristic temperature (T_coh ~40 K) due to the indirect RKKY interaction among f–f electrons. Besides, T_coh from the theoretical simulation was close to T_γ−α from the XRD spectra. These issues suggested that the Kondo scenario might play an important role in the γ–α phase transition of cerium thin films.