Motivated by recent progress on ultracold alkaline-earth atoms towards the goal of simulating Kondo physics, in this work we exactly solve the few-body problem of one and two trapped fermions in one dimension interacting with a localized impurity under tunable spin-exchange interaction. It is found that depending on the sign of the spin-exchange coupling, i.e., ferromagnetic (FM) or antiferromagnetic (AFM), the attractive and repulsive branches can hold different magnetic structures. For the two-fermion case, we demonstrate the Kondo screening effect for the attractive branch with AFM coupling, and show that such screening is absent for the ground state with FM coupling. Moreover, we find a sequence of FM upper branches in the AFM coupling side. These FM states are orthogonal to all other attractive branches and their wave functions feature a full spin-charge separation. The effect of an additional contact interaction and the extension of our results to many particles are also discussed. This work reveals the intriguing physics uniquely associated with the spin-exchange interaction in the few-body point of view, which can be readily explored in the experiment of ultracold alkaline-earth atoms.
We investigate the boundary effects that arise when spin-
21 impurities interact with the edges of the antiferromagnetic spin-
21 Heisenberg chain through spin exchange interactions. We consider both cases when the couplings are ferromagnetic or anti-ferromagnetic. We find that in the case of antiferromagnetic interaction, when the impurity coupling strength is much weaker than that in the bulk, the impurity is screened in the ground state via the Kondo effect. The Kondo phase is characterized by the Lorentzian density of states and dynamically generated Kondo temperature
TK. As the impurity coupling strength increases,
TK increases until it reaches its maximum value
T0=2πJ which is the maximum energy carried by a single spinon. When the impurity coupling strength is increased further, we enter another phase, the bound mode phase, where the impurity is screened in the ground state by a single particle bound mode exponentially localized at the edge to which the impurity is coupled. We find that the impurity can be unscreened by removing the bound mode. There exists a boundary eigenstate phase transition between the Kondo and the bound-mode phases, a transition which is characterized by the change in the number of towers of the Hilbert space. The transition also manifests itself in ground state quantities like local impurity density of states and the local impurity magnetization. When the impurity coupling is ferromagnetic, the impurity is unscreened in the ground state; however, when the absolute value of the ratio of the impurity and bulk coupling strengths is greater than
54, the impurity can be screened by adding a bound mode that costs energy greater than
T0. When two impurities are considered, the phases exhibited by each impurity remain unchanged in the thermodynamic limit, but nevertheless the system exhibits a rich phase diagram.
We investigate the boundary effects that arise when spin-
21 impurities interact with the edges of the antiferromagnetic spin-
21 Heisenberg chain through spin exchange interactions. We consider both cases when the couplings are ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic. We find that in the case of antiferromagnetic interaction, when the impurity coupling strength is much weaker than that in the bulk, the impurity is screened in the ground state via the Kondo effect. The Kondo phase is characterized by the Lorentzian density of states and a dynamical scale, the Kondo temperature
TK, is generated. As the impurity coupling strength increases,
TK increases until it reaches its maximum value ${T}_{0}=2\ensuremath{\pi}J$ which is the maximum energy carried by a single spinon. When the impurity coupling strength is increased further, we enter another phase, the bound mode phase, where the impurity is screened in the ground state by a single particle bound mode exponentially localized at the edge to which the impurity is coupled. We find that, in contrast to the Kondo phase, the impurity can be unscreened by unoccupying the single particle bound mode. This costs an energy
Eb that is greater than
T0. There exists a boundary eigenstate phase transition between the Kondo and the bound-mode phases, a transition which is characterized by the change in the number of towers of the Hilbert space. The transition also manifests itself in local thermodynamic quantities---local impurity density of states and the local impurity magnetization in the ground state. When the impurity coupling is ferromagnetic, the impurity is unscreened in the ground state; however, when the absolute value of the ratio of the impurity and bulk coupling strengths is greater than
54, the impurity can be screened by adding a bound mode that costs energy greater than
T0. When two impurities are considered, the phases exhibited by each impurity remain unchanged in the thermodynamic limit, but nevertheless the system exhibits a rich phase diagram.
A nuclear-spin-exchange interaction exists between two ultracold fermionic alkali-earth-metal-like atoms in the electronic
1S0 state (
g state) and
3P0 state (
e state) and is an essential ingredient for the quantum simulation of the Kondo effect. We study the control of this spin-exchange interaction for two atoms simultaneously confined in a quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) tube, where the
g atom is freely moving in the axial direction while the
e atom is further localized by an additional axial trap and behaves as a quasi-0D impurity. In this system, the two atoms experience effective 1D spin-exchange interactions in both even and odd partial-wave channels, whose intensities can be controlled by the characteristic lengths of the confinements via confinement-induced resonances (CIRs). In a previous work, we studied this problem with a simplified pure 1D model [Y. Cheng et al., Phys. Rev. A 96, 063605 (2017)]. In the present work, we go beyond that pure 1D approximation. We model the transverse and axial confinements by harmonic traps with finite characteristic lengths ${a}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ and
az, respectively, and exactly solve the quasi-1D--quasi-0D scattering problem between these two atoms. Using the solutions, we derive the effective 1D spin-exchange interaction and investigate the locations and widths of the even-odd wave CIRs for our system. It is found that when the ratio ${a}_{z}/{a}_{\ensuremath{\perp}}$ is larger, the CIRs can be induced by weaker confinements, which are easier to be realized experimentally. The comparison between our results and a recent experiment by L. Riegger et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 143601 (2018)] shows that the two experimentally observed resonance branches of the spin-exchange effect are due to an even-wave CIR and an odd-wave CIR, respectively. Our results are advantageous for the control and description of either the effective spin-exchange interaction or other types of interactions between ultracold atoms in quasi-(1+0)-dimensional systems.
The goal of this book is the investigation of physical effects at low energies caused by magnetic impurity adatoms, coupled to a small non-magnetic metallic substrate surface. Such systems can be understood with help of multi-impurity Kondo models, describing the substrate as a tight-binding model of finite-size and the impurities as quantum spins, which are antiferromagnetically coupled locally to their respective substrate sites. Focusing on one-dimensional finite-size systems with open boundary conditions at half-filling numerical exact diagonalisation and the variation of matrix product states (VMPS) method are used for the investigation. It is the aim to study finite-size effects in different regimes of the magnetic exchange interaction. For example due to the finite size of the system, the interplay of the Kondo effect and the indirect magnetic Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) exchange interaction between impurity spins is site dependent and non-trivial for at least three impurity Kondo systems. Furthermore evidence for an unconventional and novel magnetic coupling mechanism, causing magnetic order in the actually non-magnetic substrate, due to inverse indirect magnetic exchange, will be given.
A recent experiment has observed Feshbach resonances between alkali and alkaline-earth-metal atoms. These Feshbach resonances are insensitive to the nuclear spin of alkaline-earth-metal atoms. Utilizing this feature, we propose to take this system as a candidate to perform quantum simulation of the Kondo effect. An alkali-metal atom can form a molecule with an alkaline-earth-metal atom with different nuclear spins, which plays the role of spin-exchange scattering responsible for the Kondo effect. Furthermore, we point out that the existence of three-body bound state and atom-molecule resonance due to the Efimov effect can enhance this spin-exchange scattering and therefore enhance the Kondo effect. We discuss this mechanism first with a three-body problem in free space and then demonstrate that the same mechanism still holds when the alkali-metal atom is localized by an external trap and becomes an impurity embedded in the alkaline-earth-metal atomic gases.