Phonon thermal transport of URu2Si2: broken translational symmetry and strong-coupling of the "hidden order" to the lattice

A dramatic increase in the total thermal conductivity (kappa) is observed in the hidden order (HO) state of single crystal URu2Si2. Through measurements of the thermal Hall conductivity, we explicitly show that the electronic contribution to kappa is extremely small, so that this large increase in kappa is dominated by phonon conduction. An itinerant BCS or mean-field model describes this behavior well: the increase in kappa is associated with the opening of a large energy gap at the Fermi surface, thereby decreasing electron-phonon scattering. Our analysis implies that the "hidden order" parameter is strongly coupled to the lattice, suggestive of a broken symmetry involving charge degrees of freedom.