Anisotropic Non-Fermi Liquid and Dynamical Planckian Scaling of a Quasi-Kagome Kondo Lattice System

Abstract

At the quantum critical point of correlated materials, a non-Fermi liquid state appears where electron correlations continuously develop to very low temperatures. The relaxation time of the interacted electrons, namely quasiparticles, is scaled with the Planckian time, $\hbar/k_{\rm B}T$. However, there is a debate over whether heavy-fermion systems can obey the Planckian time. In the optical conductivity spectra, the Drude response will appear as the scaling of $\hbar\omega/k_{\rm B}T$ as the dynamical Planckian scaling (DPS). Here, we report the non-Fermi liquid behavior in the Drude response of a candidate for such materials, the quasi-kagome Kondo lattice CeRhSn. Even though the material shows a strong valence fluctuation, renormalized Drude responses observed at the photon energy below 100 meV are characterized by non-Fermi-liquid-like scattering rate $1/\tau$. The heavy carriers' Drude response only for the Ce quasi-kagome plane obeyed DPS below 80 K, suggesting the anisotropic quantum criticality with the strong $c \textrm{-} f$ hybridization.