Specific heat and magnetic susceptibility of CeNiSn doped with Rh

CeNiSn is known as a semimetallic system with a small pseudogap at the Fermi energy. We investigate the effect of Rh doping on the Kondo insulator CeNiSn by means of measurements of ac magnetic susceptibility and specific heat. We show that the formation of the Kondo insulator narrow gap in CeNi1-xRhxSn is associated with disorder-induced f-electron localization. For doped CeNiSn with x ≤ 0.06, the electrical resistivity data follow an activation and variable range hopping behaviour at low T, consistent with weak disorder and localization, while C/T is large, which is not a common feature of Kondo insulators. For x > 0.06, the system is metallic and exhibits non-Fermi liquid behaviour with magnetic susceptibility χ ∼ T-n with n ∼ 0.4 and electrical resistivity ρ ∼ T.