Exotic Kondo crossover in a wide temperature region in the topological Kondo insulator SmB6 revealed by high-resolution ARPES

Abstract

Temperature dependence of the electronic structure of SmB6 is studied by high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) down to 1 K. We demonstrate that there is no essential difference for the dispersions of the surface states below and above the resistivity saturating anomaly (∼3.5K). Quantitative analyses of the surface states indicate that the quasiparticle scattering rate increases linearly as a function of temperature and binding energy, which differs from Fermi-liquid behavior. Most intriguingly, we observe that the hybridization between the d and f states builds gradually over a wide temperature region (30K