612 C.

11 Mixed Valence and Heavy Fermions

Fig. 11.7). If Vk vanishes at certain points of the Brillouin zone, the

gapping may be incomplete but in any case, we expect a strong dip in
the DOS at c f .

Figure 11.7: The hybridization of the conduction band Ek = k2,and a dispersionless

f-band at ~f = 0.3 (thin dotted lines) with v = 0.15 gives rise to two hybridized bands
(bold lines). Horizontal axis: k (in units of n / a ) , vertical axis: energy.

In Fig. 11.7, the hybridization gap is indirect: the minimum of A:

is associated with the conduction band minimum at the zone center
((AL)min M ~f +
w2/(W - ~ f ) ) ,while the maximum of A, is at the zone
boundary ((Ai)max M cf - w2/cf). Assuming that w is rather smaller
than W , we find that the hybridization gap

(11.6)

is an order of w/W smaller than v.

With n 5 2 electrons per site, the Uf = 0 ground state (the non-
interacting Fermi Sea) is obtained by filling up the lower hybridized
sight, it may appear that on-site hybridization is forbidden if the RE atom sits at
a site with central symmetry, because 4f-states are odd, while typical conduction
band states have 5d or 6s (i.e., even) character. However, one should envisage that
it is possible to construct odd linear combinations of the, say, 6s states of the anions
surrounding the central RE site, and thus we may speak about on-site hybridization
in a model in which only the RE sites are regarded as lattice sites.