I construct non-Fermi liquid (NFL) quantum impurity models that are similar to the overscreened multi-channel Kondo models with the difference that an odd number of electron species screen the impurity. The simplest of them, named sesqui-channel (i.e. one-and-a-half-channel) Kondo (1.5CK) model, has less degrees of freedom and is simpler than the two-channel Kondo model, and yet it exhibits NFL physics. Using representation theory I derive the 1.5CK model for a spin-half impurity surrounded with electrons in cubic crystal field and solve it with the numerical renormalization group.
I construct non-Fermi liquid (NFL) quantum impurity models that are similar to the overscreened multi-channel Kondo models with the difference that an odd number of electron species screen the impurity. The simplest of them, named sesqui-channel (i.e. one-and-a-half-channel) Kondo (1.5CK) model, has less degrees of freedom and is simpler than the two-channel Kondo model, and yet it exhibits NFL physics. Using representation theory I derive the 1.5CK model for a spin-half impurity surrounded with electrons in cubic crystal field and solve it with the numerical renormalization group.
Hund metals have attracted attention in recent years due to their unconventional superconductivity, which supposedly originates from non-Fermi-liquid (NFL) properties of the normal state.When studying Hund metals using dynamical mean-field theory, one arrives at a self-consistent "Hund impurity problem" involving a multiorbital quantum impurity with nonzero Hund coupling interacting with a metallic bath.If its spin and orbital degrees of freedom are screened at different energy scales, T sp < T orb , the intermediate energy window is governed by a novel NFL fixed point, whose nature had not yet been clarified.We resolve this problem by providing an analytical solution of a paradigmatic example of a Hund impurity problem, involving two spin and three orbital degrees of freedom.To this end, we combine a state-ofthe-art implementation of the numerical renormalization group, capable of exploiting non-Abelian symmetries, with a generalization of Affleck and Ludwig's conformal field theory (CFT) approach for multichannel Kondo models.We characterize the NFL fixed point of Hund metals in detail for a Kondo model with an impurity forming an SUð2Þ × SUð3Þ spin-orbital multiplet, tuned such that the NFL energy window is very wide.The impurity's spin and orbital susceptibilities then exhibit striking power-law behavior, which we explain using CFT arguments.We find excellent agreement between CFT predictions and numerical renormalization group results.Our main physical conclusion is that the regime of spinorbital separation, where orbital degrees of freedom have been screened but spin degrees of freedom have not, features anomalously strong local spin fluctuations: the impurity susceptibility increases as χ imp sp ∼ ω -γ , with γ > 1.
The Kondo problem, which describes the interaction of a spin s magnetic impurity with a free Fermi gas, is a classic example of strongly coupled physics. Historically, the problem has been solved by Wilson's numerical renormalization group and later by Bethe ansatz. In this paper, we present an alternate analytic solution of the Kondo problem that combines an expansion in 1/s with the renormalization group. We study both the case of an impurity interacting with a single channel K=1 of fermions in the s→∞ limit and the case with K channels in the double-scaling limit K→∞, s→∞, K/s fixed. Our approach allows us to describe analytically intermediate scales of the Kondo problem at large s and compute thermodynamic observables such as the impurity entropy and susceptibility. We find these observables to agree with the Bethe ansatz results. We also compute the impurity spectral function, finite temperature resistivity and the Kondo screening cloud profile, properties that are not easily accessible from Bethe ansatz. Notably, in the regime K>2s we access the "non-Fermi-liquid" overscreened fixed point of the multichannel Kondo problem.
We discuss the two-channel Kondo problem with a pseudogap density of states $\ensuremath{\rho}(\ensuremath{\omega})\ensuremath{\propto}{|\ensuremath{\omega}|}^{r}$ of the bath fermions. Combining both analytical and numerical renormalization group techniques, we characterize the impurity phases and quantum phase transitions of the relevant Kondo and Anderson models. The line of stable points, corresponding to the overscreened non-Fermi-liquid behavior of the metallic r=0 case, is replaced by a stable particle-hole-symmetric intermediate-coupling fixed point for $0<r<{r}_{\mathrm{max}}\ensuremath{\approx}0.23$. For r>rmax, this non-Fermi-liquid phase disappears, and instead a critical fixed point with an emergent spin-channel symmetry appears, controlling the quantum phase transition between two phases with stable spin and channel moments, respectively. We propose low-energy field theories to describe the quantum phase transitions, all being formulated in fermionic variables. We employ $\ensuremath{\epsilon}$ expansion techniques to calculate critical properties near the critical dimensions r=0 and 1, the latter being potentially relevant for two-channel Kondo impurities in neutral graphene. We find the analytical results to be in excellent agreement with those obtained from applying Wilson's numerical renormalization group technique.
We have studied the quadrupolar Kondo effect for an impurity in cubic environment with taking account of a singlet excited state Γ1, which models a Pr3+ ion with a non-Kramers double ground state Γ3. We have used the numerical renormalization group approach and determined the phase diagram with varying quadrupole Kondo coupling J and Γ1 excitation energy Δ. Two phases are found and identified as local Fermi liquid and non-Fermi liquid. This non-Fermi liquid phase is characteristic to the two-channel Kondo impurity, and a similar phase diagram has been also found in other extended quadrupole models. We have analyzed in detail the J-dependence of the Kondo temperature TK near the phase boundary $J_c (Δ) $ and found a nice scaling behavior with an stretched exponential form TK∼δJαexp(−const./δJ) where δJ≡J−Jc(Δ). This differs from the standard scaling form and indicates that one needs to consider renormalization of multiple coupling constants.
Many correlated metallic materials are described by Landau Fermi-liquid theory at low energies, but for Hund metals the Fermi-liquid coherence scale T_{FL} is found to be surprisingly small. In this Letter, we study the simplest impurity model relevant for Hund metals, the three-channel spin-orbital Kondo model, using the numerical renormalization group (NRG) method and compute its global phase diagram. In this framework, T_{FL} becomes arbitrarily small close to two new quantum critical points that we identify by tuning the spin or spin-orbital Kondo couplings into the ferromagnetic regimes. We find quantum phase transitions to a singular Fermi-liquid or a novel non-Fermi-liquid phase. The new non-Fermi-liquid phase shows frustrated behavior involving alternating overscreenings in spin and orbital sectors, with universal power laws in the spin (ω^{-1/5}), orbital (ω^{1/5}) and spin-orbital (ω^{1}) dynamical susceptibilities. These power laws, and the NRG eigenlevel spectra, can be fully understood using conformal field theory arguments, which also clarify the nature of the non-Fermi-liquid phase.
An exact expression is derived for the electron Green function in two-channel Kondo models with one and two impurities, describing the crossover from non-Fermi liquid (NFL) behavior at intermediate temperatures to standard Fermi liquid (FL) physics at low temperatures. Symmetry-breaking perturbations generically present in experiment ensure the standard low-energy FL description, but the full crossover is wholly characteristic of the unstable NFL state. Distinctive conductance lineshapes in quantum dot devices should result. We exploit a connection between this crossover and one occurring in a classical boundary Ising model to calculate real-space electron densities at finite temperature. The single universal finite-temperature Green function is then extracted by inverting the integral transformation relating these Friedel oscillations to the t matrix. Excellent agreement is demonstrated between exact results and full numerical renormalization group calculations.