Emergent magnetic anisotropy in the cubic heavy-fermion metal CeIn3

Heavy fermion materials: Emergence of field-induced magnetic anisotropy Magnetic anisotropy emerges in structurally isotropic heavy fermion metals under large magnetic fields. Compounds that contain rare earth or actinide ions with unpaired f-electrons can exhibit a range of fascinating phenomena, such as heavy fermion behaviour. The role of magnetic and electronic anisotropies is often crucial for understanding the rich physics of these materials, but it can often be difficult to disentangle the contributions from structural anisotropies. An international team of researchers led by Philip Moll from the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids now show that when magnetic fields are applied, with strengths similar to the crystal fields, magnetic anisotropies can emerge in cubic f-electron materials that are structurally isotropic. They show that this arises from non-spherically symmetric spin interactions, which exposes failures of the spherically symmetric models often used to describe these systems.