Low-temperature electrical resistivity in paramagnetic spinelLiV2O4

Abstract

The $3d$-electron spinel compound ${\text{LiV}}_{2}{\text{O}}_{4}$ exhibits heavy fermion behavior below 30 K which is related to antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations strongly enhanced in an extended region of momentum space. This mechanism explains enhanced thermodynamic quantities and nearly critical NMR relaxation in the framework of the self-consistent renormalization (SCR) theory. Here we show that the low-$T$ Fermi-liquid behavior of the resistivity and a deviation from this behavior for higher $T$ may also be understood within that context. We calculate the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity $\ensuremath{\rho}(T)$ assuming that two basic mechanisms of the quasiparticle scattering, resulting from impurities and spin fluctuations, operate simultaneously at low temperature. The calculation is based on the variational principle in the form of a perturbative series expansion for $\ensuremath{\rho}(T)$. A peculiar behavior of $\ensuremath{\rho}(T)$ in ${\text{LiV}}_{2}{\text{O}}_{4}$ is related to properties of low-energy spin fluctuations whose $T$ dependence is obtained from SCR theory.