Polarized-neutron study of spin dynamics in the Kondo insulator YbB12

Inelastic neutron scattering experiments have been performed on the archetype compound YbB12, using neutron polarization analysis to separate the magnetic signal from the phonon background. With decreasing temperature, components characteristic for a single-site spin-fluctuation dynamics are suppressed, giving place to specific, strongly Q-dependent, low-energy excitations near the spin-gap edge. This crossover is discussed in terms of a simple crystal-field description of the incoherent high-temperature state and a predominantly local mechanism for the formation of the low-temperature singlet ground state.