Nuclear magnetic resonance Knight shifts in the presence of strong spin-orbit and crystal-field potentials

Abstract

In recent years there has been increasing interest in materials with strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Nuclear magnetic resonance is a valuable microscopic probe of such systems because of the hyperfine interactions between the nuclear spins and the electron degrees of freedom. In materials with weak SOC the NMR Knight shift contains two contributions: one from the electron orbital susceptibility and the other from the electron spin susceptibility. These contributions can be separated by plotting the Knight shift versus the bulk susceptibility and extracting the slope and intercept. Here we examine the case where the SOC is non-negligible, in which case the slope and intercept are no longer simply related to these two contributions. These results have important implications for NMR studies of heavy fermions, as well as 4d and 5d systems.