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Physics Today

Exact solution of Kondo problem

Barbara Goss Levi

Published May 1, 1981• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

The Kondo problem concerns a simple physical model of magnetic impurities in metals that has required the most sophisticated of mathematical techniques. To theorists, the model not only represents a first step towards understanding the far more complex problem of ferromagnetism but also appears tantalizingly close to exact solution by the techniques employed for renormalizable field theories. In 1975 Kenneth Wilson of Cornell University successfully used renormalization-group techniques to calculate numerically a key parameter in the Kondo problem. This past year Natan Andrei of New York University and independently P. B. Wiegmann of the Landau Institute in Moscow executed a second coup by exactly diagonalizing the Hamiltonian to allow a solution in closed form.

DOI
10.1063/1.2914564

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The Kondo problem concerns a simple physical model of magnetic impurities in metals that has required the most sophisticated of mathematical techniques. To theorists, the model not only represents a first step towards understanding the far more complex problem of ferromagnetism but also appears tantalizingly close to exact solution by the techniques employed for renormalizable field theories. In 1975 Kenneth Wilson of Cornell University successfully used renormalization-group techniques to calculate numerically a key parameter in the Kondo problem. This past year Natan Andrei of New York University and independently P. B. Wiegmann of the Landau Institute in Moscow executed a second coup by exactly diagonalizing the Hamiltonian to allow a solution in closed form.
In the past few years there has been a resurgence of interest in dynamical impurity problems, as a result of developments in the theory of correlated electron systems. The general dynamical impurity problem is a set of conduction electrons interacting with an impurity which has internal degrees of freedom. The simplest and earliest example, the Kondo problem, has attracted interest since the mid-sixties not only because of its physical importance but also as an example of a model displaying logarithmic divergences order by order in perturbation theory. It provided one of the earliest applications of the renormalization group method, which is designed to deal with just such a situation. As we shall see, the antiferromagnetic Kondo model is controlled by a strong-coupling fixed point, and the essence of the renormalization group solution is to carry out the global renormalization numerically starting from the original (weak-coupling) Hamiltonian. In these lectures, we shall describe an alternative route in which we identify an exactly solvable model which renormalizes to the same fixed point as the original dynamical impurity problem. This approach is akin to determining the critical behavior at a second order phase transition point by solving any model in a given universality class.
In the early 1970s, Wilson developed the concept of a fully nonperturbative renormalization group transformation. When applied to the Kondo problem, this numerical renormalization group (NRG) method gave for the first time the full crossover from the high-temperature phase of a free spin to the low-temperature phase of a completely screened spin. The NRG method was later generalized to a variety of quantum impurity problems. The purpose of this review is to give a brief introduction to the NRG method, including some guidelines for calculating physical quantities, and to survey the development of the NRG method and its various applications over the last 30 years. These applications include variants of the original Kondo problem such as the non-Fermi-liquid behavior in the two-channel Kondo model, dissipative quantum systems such as the spin-boson model, and lattice systems in the framework of the dynamical mean-field theory.
The Kondo model describes a magnetic impurity in a metallic host. Here, the authors use variational approaches (Lanczos, Yosida, Gutzwiller) and quasi-exact numerical techniques (numerical renormalization group, density matrix renormalization group) to study the ground-state energy and magnetization, and compare these properties to Bethe ansatz results. The Gutzwiller wave function is an excellent trial state for strong coupling. For weak coupling, the numerical renormalization group gives the best description of the magnetic properties. A combination of Bethe ansatz and perturbation theory provides new benchmark results for the zero-field susceptibility.
We study the Kondo model---a magnetic impurity coupled to a one-dimensional wire via exchange coupling---by using Wilson's numerical renormalization group technique. By applying an approach similar to which was used to compute the two-impurity problem we managed to improve the poor spatial resolution of the numerical renormalization group method. In this way we have calculated the impurity-spin--conduction-electron-spin correlation function which is a measure of the Kondo compensation cloud whose existence has been a long-standing problem in solid-state physics. We also present results on the temperature dependence of the Kondo correlations.
In this work, using the finite-U slave boson mean-field approximation to solve the single-impurity Anderson model, the authors apply two different strategies to study the Kondo cloud, by analyzing quantities that are dependent on the distance to the magnetic impurity and then finding a universal distance scale ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}$ through the collapse of the results into an universal function. The first method is based on the analysis of the local density of states of the conduction electrons (denoted as ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}^{L})$, while the second relies on the analysis of spin correlations $({\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}})$. Our calculations show that there is exact quantitative agreement, in the way ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}$ depends on $U/\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}$, between ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}}$ and the results obtained through the heuristic expression ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}\ensuremath{\propto}{v}_{F}/{T}_{K}$, while there is very close quantitative agreement between ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Sigma}}}$ and ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{K}^{L}$. The use of the slave boson technique to calculate the spin correlations, which eliminates finite size effects, allowed us to study very large Kondo clouds, something that is very difficult using other techniques, like the density matrix renormalization Group method, for example. In addition, the very smooth curves obtained for the spin correlations allowed us to qualitatively identify a region in the Kondo cloud, adjacent to the impurity, that had been connected to the free orbital fixed point in previous numerical renormalization group calculations [Phys. Rev. B 84, 115120 (2011)].
This review covers several topics involving renormalization group ideas. The solution of the sss-wave Kondo Hamiltonian, describing a single magnetic impurity in a nonmagnetic metal, is explained in detail. See Secs. VII-IX. "Block spin" methods, applied to the two dimensional Ising model, are explained in Sec. VI. The first three sections give a relatively short review of basic renormalization group ideas, mainly in the context of critical phenomena. The relationship of the modern renormalization group to the older problems of divergences in statistical mechanics and field theory and field theoretic renormalization is discussed in Sec. IV. In Sec. V the special case of "marginal variables" is discussed in detail, along with the relationship of the modern renormalization group to its original formulation by Gell-Mann and Low and others.