Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 331, Issue 6016, Pages 439-442Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1197358
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Funding
- Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science Technology [20102002, 20102006]
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [22740241, 20224008, 20102006, 21340099, 23654118] Funding Source: KAKEN
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A second-order phase transition is characterized by spontaneous symmetry breaking. The nature of the broken symmetry in the so-called hidden-order phase transition in the heavy-fermion compound URu2Si2, at transition temperature T-h = 17.5 K, has posed a long-standing mystery. We report the emergence of an in-plane anisotropy of the magnetic susceptibility below T-h, which breaks the four-fold rotational symmetry of the tetragonal URu2Si2. Two-fold oscillations in the magnetic torque under in-plane field rotation were sensitively detected in small pure crystals. Our findings suggest that the hidden-order phase is an electronic nematic phase, a translationally invariant metallic phase with spontaneous breaking of rotational symmetry.
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