We study by Wilson numerical renormalization group the spectral properties of a two-orbital Anderson impurity model in the presence of an exchange splitting that follows either regular or inverted Hund's rules. The phase diagram contains a non-Fermi-liquid fixed point separating a screened phase, where conventional Kondo effect occurs, from an unscreened one, where the exchange splitting takes care of quenching the impurity degrees of freedom. On the Kondo screened side close to this fixed point the impurity density of states shows a narrow Kondo peak on top of a broader resonance. This narrow peak transforms in the unscreened phase into a narrow pseudogap inside the broad resonance. Right at the fixed point only the latter survives. The fixed point is therefore identified by a jump of the density of states at the chemical potential. We also consider the effect of several particle-hole symmetry-breaking terms. We show that particle-hole perturbations that simply shift the orbital energies do not wash out the fixed point, unlike those perturbations that hybridize the two orbitals. Consequently the density-of-state jump at the chemical potential remains finite even away from particle-hole symmetry. In other words, the pseudogap stays pinned at the chemical potential, although it is partially filled in. We also discuss the relevance of these results for lattice models that map onto this Anderson impurity model in the limit of large lattice coordination. Upon approaching the Mott metal-insulator transition, these lattice models necessarily enter a region with a local criticality that reflects the impurity non-Fermi-liquid fixed point. However, unlike the impurity, the lattice can get rid of the single-impurity fixed-point instability by spontaneously developing bulk coherent symmetry-broken phases, which we identify for different lattice models.
We study by Wilson numerical renormalization group the spectral properties of a two-orbital Anderson impurity model in the presence of an exchange splitting that follows either regular or inverted Hund's rules. The phase diagram contains a non-Fermi-liquid fixed point separating a screened phase, where conventional Kondo effect occurs, from an unscreened one, where the exchange splitting takes care of quenching the impurity degrees of freedom. On the Kondo screened side close to this fixed point the impurity density of states shows a narrow Kondo peak on top of a broader resonance. This narrow peak transforms in the unscreened phase into a narrow pseudogap inside the broad resonance. Right at the fixed point only the latter survives. The fixed point is therefore identified by a jump of the density of states at the chemical potential. We also consider the effect of several particle-hole symmetry-breaking terms. We show that particle-hole perturbations that simply shift the orbital energies do not wash out the fixed point, unlike those perturbations that hybridize the two orbitals. Consequently the density-of-state jump at the chemical potential remains finite even away from particle-hole symmetry. In other words, the pseudogap stays pinned at the chemical potential, although it is partially filled in. We also discuss the relevance of these results for lattice models that map onto this Anderson impurity model in the limit of large lattice coordination. Upon approaching the Mott metal-insulator transition, these lattice models necessarily enter a region with a local criticality that reflects the impurity non-Fermi-liquid fixed point. However, unlike the impurity, the lattice can get rid of the single-impurity fixed-point instability by spontaneously developing bulk coherent symmetry-broken phases, which we identify for different lattice models.
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 investigate the real-space spectral properties of strongly correlated multi-impurity arrays in the Kondo insulator regime. Employing a recently developed mapping onto an effective correlated cluster problem makes the problem accessible to the numerical renormalization group. The evolution of the spectrum as a function of cluster size and cluster site is studied. We applied the extended Lieb-Mattis theorem to predict whether the spectral function must vanish at the Fermi energy developing a true pseudogap or whether the spectral function remains finite at $\ensuremath{\omega}=0$. Our numerical renormalization group spectra confirm the predictions of the theorem and shows a metallic behavior at the surface of a cluster prevailing in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We present a conventional minimal extension of a particle-hole symmetric Anderson lattice model at U=0 that leads to a gapped bulk band but a surface band with mainly f-orbital character for weak and moderate hybridization strength. The change in the site-dependent spectra upon introducing a Kondo hole in the center of the cluster is presented as a function of the hole-orbital energy. In particular, the spectral signatures across the Kosterlitz-Thouless-type quantum phase transition from a singlet to a local moment fixed point are discussed.
The problem of two magnetic impurities in a normal metal exposes the two opposite tendencies in the formation of a singlet ground state, driven respectively by the single-ion Kondo effect with conduction electrons to screen impurity spins or the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interaction between the two impurities to directly form impurity spin singlet. However, whether the competition between these two tendencies can lead to a quantum critical point has been debated over more than two decades. Here, we study this problem by applying the newly proposed natural orbitals renormalization group method to a lattice version of the two-impurity Kondo model with a direct exchange K between the two impurity spins. The method allows for unbiased access to the ground state wave functions and low-lying excitations for sufficiently large system sizes. We demonstrate the existence of a quantum critical point, characterized by the power-law divergence of impurity staggered susceptibility with critical exponent $\ensuremath{\gamma}=0.60(1)$, on the antiferromagnetic side of K when the interimpurity distance R is even lattice spacing, while a crossover behavior is recovered when R is odd lattice spacing. These results have ultimately resolved the long-standing discrepancy between the numerical renormalization group and quantum Monte Carlo studies, confirming a link of this two-impurity Kondo critical point to a hidden particle-hole symmetry predicted by the local Fermi liquid theory.
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 local Cu-O model is a local version of the extended Hubbard model and corresponds to a two-channel Anderson impurity model in which the two channels correspond to screening and hybridizing channels, respectively, and the screening interaction, Udc, is short range. The model represents a more realistic model for the local excitations in heavy fermions and may also be of relevance in understanding the normal state properties of high temperature superconductors. Below a critical screening strength, UdcUdccrit the particle-hole symmetric model exhibits Fermi-liquid behavior, whereas for Udc>Udccrit a non-Fermi-liquid state forms. Here, we report results of a numerical renormalization group calculation for the spectral density of single-particle excitations, in both the Fermi-liquid and non-Fermi-liquid regimes. The Kondo resonance is strongly modified for Udc close to Udccrit and is destroyed for Udc>Udccrit. The relevance of these results for high temperature superconductors and the photoemission spectra of heavy fermions is discussed.
We study how the non-Fermi-liquid nature of the overscreened multichannel Kondo impurity model affects the response to a BCS pairing term that, in the absence of the impurity, opens a gap $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$. We find that the low-energy spectrum in the limit $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$ actually does not correspond to the spectrum strictly at $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=0$. In particular, in the two-channel Kondo model, the $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$ ground state is an orbitally degenerate spin singlet, while it is an orbital singlet with a residual spin degeneracy at $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=0$. In addition, there are fractionalized spin-1/2 subgap excitations whose energy in units of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ tends toward a finite and universal value when $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0$, as if the universality of the anomalous power-law exponents that characterize the overscreened Kondo effect turned into universal energy ratios when the scale invariance is broken by $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremath{\ne}0$. This intriguing phenomenon can be explained by the renormalization flow toward the overscreened fixed point and the gap cutting off the orthogonality catastrophe singularities. We also find other non-Fermi-liquid features at finite $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$: the local density of states lacks coherence peaks, the states in the continuum above the gap are unconventional, and the boundary entropy is a nonmonotonic function of temperature. The persistent subgap excitations are characteristic of the non-Fermi-liquid fixed point of the model, and thus depend on the impurity spin and the number of screening channels.