4f crystal field ground state of the strongly correlated topological insulator SmB6
Abstract
We investigated the crystal-electric field ground state of the 4f manifold in the strongly correlated topological insulator SmB6 using core level non-resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (NIXS). The directional dependence of the scattering function that arises from higher multipole transitions establishes unambiguously that the 8 quartet state of the Sm f5 J=5/2 configuration governs the ground-state symmetry and hence the topological properties of SmB6. Our findings contradict the results of density functional calculations reported so far.
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