Correlation function of an impurity spin in an one-dimensional spin-system

Guangyong Xu

James E. Gubernatis

Marco Nizama, Diego Frustaglia, K. Hallberg

We study the ground-state entanglement properties of nanostructured Kondo systems consisting of a pair of impurity spins coupled to a background of confined electrons. The competition between the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida-like coupling and the Kondo effect determines the development of quantum correlations between the different parts of the system. A key element is the electronic filling due to confinement. An even electronic filling leads to results similar to those found previously for extended systems, where the properties of the reduced impurity spin subsystem are uniquely determined by the spin-correlation function defining a one-dimensional phase space. An odd filling, instead, breaks spin rotation symmetry unfolding a two-dimensional phase space showing rich entanglement characteristics as, e.g., the requirement of a larger amount of entanglement for the development of nonlocal correlations between impurity spins. We illustrate these results by numerical simulations of elliptic quantum corrals with magnetic impurities at the foci as a case study.

W. Zhang, J. Igarashi, Peter Fulde

We study by Monte Carlo simulations a magnetic impurity coupled antiferromagnetically to a one-dimensional quantum spin model. The impurity susceptibility and the spin-correlation function are calculated. By defining and evaluating an energy scale from the inverse of the impurity susceptibility at zero temperature, we find a scaling relation for the impurity susceptibility in agreement with the prediction of the conformal field theory. We analyze the problem by mapping the spin model onto the resonant-level model, and interpret the energy scale as the resonant-level width. The spin-correlation function between the impurity spin and the spins in the chain is found to extend over long range at low temperatures. We show that the system can be considered as a model of an insulator with heavy-fermion behavior.

Akihiko Matsuyama

Thomas H. Hand, Johann Kroha, H. Monien

We analyze the Kondo effect of a magnetic impurity attached to an ultrasmall metallic wire using the density matrix renormalization group. The spatial spin correlation function and the impurity spectral density are computed for system sizes of up to L=511 sites, covering the crossover from L<l{K} to L>l{K}, with l{K} the spin screening length. We establish a proportionality between the weight of the Kondo resonance and l{K} as a function of L. This suggests a spectroscopic way of detecting the Kondo cloud.