Frontiers of Condensed Matter Physics Explored with High-Field Specific Heat

Abstract

Production of very high magnetic fields in the laboratory has relentlessly increased in quantity and quality over the last five decades, as the focus periodically shifted back and forth from research in magnet technology to studies of the fundamental physics of novel materials in high fields. New strategies designed to understand microscopic mechanisms at play in materials surfaced recently, with methods to extract fundamental energy scales and thermodynamic properties from thermal probes up to 60 tesla. Here we summarize developments in the area of specific heat of materials in high magnetic fields, with emphasis in the original study of the Kondo Insulator system Ce₃Bi₄Pt₃.