622 C.

11 Mixed Valence and Heavy Fermions

Let us emphasize that we do not need a fine-tuning of the parameters of

the Hamiltonian to arrive at this conclusion, in spite of the narrowness
of the range of n f . 1 - nf <( 1 arises in a natural manner for a wide
range of 'u/(E! - cf). Indeed, our worry should be the opposite: it might
seem that all f-electron systems which are not mixed valent, should be
heavy Fermi liquids. This is certainly not so: most of the elemental rare
earths are not mixed valent, nevertheless they have quite ordinary values
of m*. As it turns out, they have to be characterized as strictly integral
valent systems (in the same sense that we call a Mott insulator strictly
integral valent). We are going to argue that there is a competition
between a small-m* and a large-m* phase, and thus in principle, both
kinds of behaviour can be explained.
In any case, there is a large class of compounds for which our pre-
vious conclusions are apparently valid. Many f-electron systems, most
often Ce, Np, U, and Yb compounds, are heavy fermion systems with
m*/m ranging up to 200, and beyond [120, 135, 317, 3751.
We outlined the phenomenology of the single-band heavy fermion
state in Secs. 10.2, 10.5, and 10.6.5; now this has to be slightly modified

mount to a large density of states p*(p) -

because of the presence of two narrow bands. A large m*/m is tanta-
(m*/m)p(p)
-
which can be
interpreted as evidence of a small effective bandwidth W * (m/m*)W.
W * is the common order of magnitude of the widths of the lower and
upper peaks of DOS, and the gap in between, but we may also think
of it as the total width of the double-peak structure which we identify
with the f-part of the renormalized hybridized bands. In contrast to the
Hubbard model case where the narrow band could be treated as isolated,
here the mass-enhanced part of the spectrum sits on the background of
a wide band24. The overall width of the structure corresponds to a
very low effective degeneracy temperature T* 0: (1 - nf)W2/vkB. In
heavy fermion materials T* M 10 - 100K, i.e., it is orders of magnitude
smaller than the Fermi temperatures of simple metals. We illustratez5
the consequences of such an extraordinarily small degeneracy tempera-
ture on the example of the long-studied heavy electron systems CeA13

2 4 T h i is
~ true even if the bare f-level is below the conduction band.
251tis understood that comparison to measurements has to remain qualitative,
since we have not discussed the effects of orbital degeneracy and crystal fields.