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arXiv:1906.03464 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Quantum impurity models from conformal field theory

Ying-Hai Wu, Hong-Hao Tu

Published Nov 1, 2019• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract The coupling between localized magnetic moments and itinerant electrons presents a plethora of interesting physics. The low-energy physics of some quantum impurity systems can be described using conformal field theory (CFT). In this paper, the connection between quantum impurity models and CFT is further strengthened as we construct a class of exactly solvable models with ground states given by CFT correlators. The method developed here is completely analytical and can be applied to fermions with an arbitrary number of colors and multiple impurities. Numerical calculations are performed to characterize certain aspects of our models for which we do not have analytical results.

DOI
10.1007/jhep11(2019)066

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Abstract The coupling between localized magnetic moments and itinerant electrons presents a plethora of interesting physics. The low-energy physics of some quantum impurity systems can be described using conformal field theory (CFT). In this paper, the connection between quantum impurity models and CFT is further strengthened as we construct a class of exactly solvable models with ground states given by CFT correlators. The method developed here is completely analytical and can be applied to fermions with an arbitrary number of colors and multiple impurities. Numerical calculations are performed to characterize certain aspects of our models for which we do not have analytical results.
Generalized quantum impurity models—which feature a few localized and strongly correlated degrees of freedom coupled to itinerant conduction electrons—describe diverse physical systems, from magnetic moments in metals to nanoelectronics quantum devices such as quantum dots or single-molecule transistors. Correlated materials can also be understood as self-consistent impurity models through dynamical mean-field theory. Accurate simulation of such models is challenging, especially at low temperatures, due to many-body effects from electronic interactions, resulting in strong renormalization. In particular, the interplay between local impurity complexity and Kondo physics is highly nontrivial. A common approach, which we further develop in this work, is to consider instead a simpler effective impurity model that still captures the low-energy physics of interest. The mapping from a bare to an effective model is typically done perturbatively, but even this can be difficult for complex systems, and the resulting effective model parameters can nevertheless be quite inaccurate. Here we develop a nonperturbative, unsupervised machine learning approach to systematically obtain low-energy effective impurity-type models, based on the renormalization-group framework. The method is shown to be general and flexible, as well as accurate and systematically improvable. We benchmark the method against exact results for the Anderson impurity model, and we provide an outlook for more complex models beyond the reach of existing methods. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We propose a series of models with inverse-square interactions, for which the ground states have an exact closed form, that describe one localized spin-1/21/21/2 Kondo impurity coupled to Luttinger liquids of itinerant bosons or fermions in the continuum or on a lattice. The model Hamiltonians contain two parts: a two-component Calogero-Sutherland model with an open boundary in the continuum or a long-range $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$-type model on the lattice, and long-range Kondo couplings between the impurity and the particles. The wave functions of the ground states in a certain basis have Jastrow product forms with powers depending on the particle statistics. It is shown that the wave functions can be expressed as chiral correlators of certain conformal field theories, which reveals that the particles are fractionalized to fully screen the Kondo impurity. This insight would be very useful in future studies on the very difficult problem of Kondo physics with interacting baths.
We construct an exactly solvable quantum impurity model which consists of spin-1/2 conduction fermions and a spin-1/2 magnetic moment. The ground state is a Gutzwiller projected Fermi sea with nonorthonormal modes and its wave function in the site-occupation basis is a Jastrow-type homogeneous polynomial. The parent Hamiltonian has all-to-all inverse-square hopping terms between the conduction fermions and inverse-square spin-exchange terms between the conduction fermions and the magnetic moment. The low-lying energy levels, spin-spin correlation function, and von Neumann entanglement entropy of our model demonstrate that it exhibits the essential aspects of spin-1/2 Kondo physics. The machinery developed in this work can generate many other exactly solvable quantum impurity models.
In this work we consider several exactly solvable models of magnetic impurities in critical quantum antiferromagnetic spin chains and multichannel Kondo impurities. Their ground-state properties are studied, and the finite set of nonlinear integral equations which exactly describe the thermodynamics of the models is constructed. We obtain several analytical low-energy expressions for the temperature, magnetic field, and frequency dependences of important characteristics of exactly solvable disordered quantum spin models and disordered multichannel Kondo impurities with essential many-body interactions. We show that the only low-energy parameter that gets renormalized is the velocity of the low-lying excitations (or the effective crossover scale connected with each impurity); the others appear to be universal. In our study several kinds of strong disorder important for experiments were used. Some of them produce low divergences in certain characteristics of our strongly disordered critical systems (compared with finite values for the homogeneous case or a single impurity). For weak disorder, or for narrow distributions of the local Kondo temperatures, our exact results reveal the presence of Kondo screening of disordered ensembles of magnetic impurities by low-lying excitations of the host. We point out that our results qualitatively coincide with the data of experiments on real disordered quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnetic systems and with the similar behavior of some heavy metallic alloys.
I begin with a review of quantum impurity models in condensed matter physics, in which a localized spin degree of freedom is coupled to an interacting conformal field theory in \\(d\\) = 2 spatial dimensions. Their properties are similar to those of supersymmetric generalizations which can be solved by the AdS/CFT correspondence; the low energy limit of the latter models is described by a \\(AdS_2\\) geometry. Then I turn to Kondo lattice models, which can be described by a mean- field theory obtained by a mapping to a quantum impurity coupled to a self-consistent environment. Such a theory yields a 'fractionalized Fermi liquid' phase of conduction electrons coupled to a critical spin liquid state, and is an attractive mean-field theory of strange metals. The recent holographic description of strange metals with a \\(AdS_2 \\times R^2\\) geometry is argued to be related to such mean-field solutions of Kondo lattice models.
I begin with a review of quantum impurity models in condensed matter physics, in which a localized spin degree of freedom is coupled to an interacting conformal field theory in d = 2 spatial dimensions. Their properties are similar to those of supersymmetric generalizations which can be solved by the AdS/CFT correspondence; the low energy limit of the latter models is described by an AdS 2 geometry. Then I turn to Kondo lattice models, which can be described by a mean-field theory obtained by a mapping to a quantum impurity coupled to a self-consistent environment. Such a theory yields a 'fractionalized Fermi liquid' phase of conduction electrons coupled to a critical spin liquid state, and is an attractive mean-field theory of strange metals. The recent holographic description of strange metals with an AdS 2 × R 2 geometry is argued to be related to such mean-field solutions of Kondo lattice models.