Interpretation of experimental results on Kondo systems with crystal field

Abstract

We present a simple approach to calculate the thermodynamic properties of single Kondo impurities including orbital degeneracy and crystal field effects (CFE) by extending a previous proposal by Schotte and Schotte (1975 Phys. Lett. 55A 38). Comparison with exact solutions for the specific heat of a quartet ground state split into two doublets shows deviations below 10% in the absence of CFE and a quantitative agreement for moderate or large CFE. As an application, we fit the measured specific heat of the compounds CeCu2Ge2, CePd3Si0.3, CePdAl, CePt, Yb2Pd2Sn and YbCo2Zn20. The agreement between theory and experiment is very good or excellent depending on the compound, except at very low temperatures due to the presence of magnetic correlations (not accounted for in the model).