Evidence for unconventional strong-coupling superconductivity in PrOs4Sb12:: An Sb nuclear quadrupole resonance study -: art. no. 027001

We report Sb-NQR results which evidence a heavy-fermion (HF) behavior and an unconventional superconducting (SC) property in PrOs4Sb12 with T-c=1.85 K. The temperature (T) dependence of nuclear-spin-lattice-relaxation rate, 1/T-1, and NQR frequency unravel a low-lying crystal-electric-field splitting below T(0)similar to10 K, associated with Pr3+(4f(2))-derived ground state. In the SC state, 1/T-1 shows neither a coherence peak just below T-c K nor a T-3-like power-law behavior observed for anisotropic HF superconductors with the line-node gap. The isotropic energy gap with its size Delta/k(B)=4.8 K seems to open up across T-c below T(*)similar to2.3 K. It is surprising that PrOs4Sb12 looks like an isotropic HF superconductor-it may indeed argue for Cooper pairing via quadrupolar fluctuations.