THERMAL-CONDUCTIVITY AND THERMALLY INDUCED CHARGE IMBALANCE IN HEAVY-FERMION SYSTEMS

We study the effects of a magnetic field and a supercurrent flow on the thermal conductivity of nonconventional superconductors with an energy gap vanishing at either points or on a line or lines on the Fermi surface. A study of the thermally induced charge imbalance is also presented. Our calculations are done using a Boltzmann equation approach, and elastic scattering by nonmagnetic impurities is assumed to be the main source of relaxation; the relaxation rate is calculated in the low-temperature limit, assuming the phase shift of the scatterers to be pi /2 in the normal state. Our calculations indicate that the effects we predict are large enough to be experimentally observable.