The interplay of structural, orbital, charge, and spin degrees of freedom is at the heart of many emergent phenomena, including superconductivity. Unraveling the underlying forces of such novel phases is a great challenge because it not only requires understanding each of these degrees of freedom, it also involves accounting for the interplay between them. Cerium-based heavy fermion compounds are an ideal playground for investigating these interdependencies, and we present evidence for a correlation between orbital anisotropy and the ground states in a representative family of materials. We have measured the 4f crystal-electric field ground-state wave functions of the strongly correlated materials CeRh1-xIrxIn5 with great accuracy using linear polarization-dependent soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy. These measurements show that these wave functions correlate with the ground-state properties of the substitution series, which covers long-range antiferromagnetic order, unconventional superconductivity, and coexistence of these two states.
Keywords: X-ray absorption; crystal fields; heavy fermions; rare earth.