This investigation reveals how heavy fermion behavior emerges in LiV2O4, suggesting strong correlations and electronic interactions in the absence of f-electrons.
LiV 2 O 4 is a spinel-structured compound that stands out as the first known 3 d -electron system exhibiting typical heavy fermion behavior. A central question is how such strong mass renormalization emerges in the absence of f -electrons. In this work, we investigate the three-dimensional electronic structure of LiV 2 O 4 thin films using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). We identify that an electron-like flat band is derived from a 1 g orbitals, along with a highly dispersive e' g band strongly coupled with phonons. The overall agreement with dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) calculations highlights the essential role of inter-orbital Hund’s coupling in reducing the a 1 g bandwidth to 25 meV, approaching a Mott state. Notably, we find that heavy-fermion behavior arises from additional renormalization at the a 1 g band near the Fermi level, likely driven by many-body interactions at energy scales down to a few meV and potentially linked to geometric frustration inherent to the spinel lattice. These results provide crucial insights into the origin of the heavy fermion behavior in 3 d -electron systems.
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Lei et al. (2025) studied this question.
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