Several heavy-fermion metals display a quantum phase transition from an antiferromagnetic metal to a heavy Fermi liquid. In some materials, however, recent experiments seem to find that the heavy Fermi liquid phase can be directly tuned into a non-Fermi liquid phase without apparent magnetic order. We analyze a candidate state for this scenario where the local moment system forms a spin liquid with gapless fermionic excitations. We discuss the thermal conductivity and spin susceptibility of this fractionalized state both in two and, in particular, three spatial dimensions for different temperature regimes. We derive a variational functional for the thermal conductivity and solve it with a variational ansatz dictated by Keldysh formalism. In sufficiently clean samples and for an appropriate temperature window, we find that thermal transport is dominated by the spinon contribution which can be detected by a characteristic maximum in the Wiedemann-Franz ratio. For the spin susceptibility, the conduction electron Pauli paramagnetism is much smaller than the spinon contribution whose temperature dependence in three dimensions is logarithmically enhanced as compared to the Fermi liquid result.

• Received 17 January 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.83.235107