We study a magnetic impurity embedded in a correlated electron system using the density-matrix renormalization group method. The correlated electron system is described by the one-dimensional Hubbard model. At half filling, we confirm that the binding energy of the singlet bound state increases exponentially in the weak-coupling regime and decreases inversely proportional to the correlation in the strong-coupling regime. The spin-spin correlation shows an exponential decay with distance from the impurity site. The correlation length becomes smaller with increasing the correlation strength. We find discontinuous reduction of the binding energy and of spin-spin correlations with hole doping. The binding energy is reduced by hole doping; however, it remains of the same order of magnitude as for the half-filled case.
An Anderson impurity in a Hubbard model on chains with finite length is studied using the density-matrix renormalization-group (DMRG) technique. In the first place, we analyzed how the reduction of electron density from half filling to quarter filling affects the Kondo resonance in the limit of Hubbard repulsion
U=0. In general, a weak dependence with the electron density was found for the local density of states (LDOS), at the impurity except when the impurity, at half filling, is close to a mixed-valence regime. Next, in the central part of this paper, we studied the effects of finite Hubbard interaction on the chain at quarter filling. Our main result is that this interaction drives the impurity into a more defined Kondo regime although accompanied in most cases by a reduction of the spectral weight of the impurity LDOS. Again, for the impurity in the mixed-valence regime, we observed an interesting nonmonotonic behavior. We also concluded that the conductance, computed for a small finite bias applied to the leads, follows the behavior of the impurity LDOS, as in the case of noninteracting chains. Finally, we analyzed how the Hubbard interaction and the finite chain length affect the spin compensation cloud both at zero and at finite temperature, in this case using quantum Monte Carlo techniques.
Two aspects of strongly correlated electron systems are studied in this thesis. Hubbard-type models are thought to be at the basis of high-critical-temperature superconductivity. One interaction which has not had much study is the nearest-neighbour hopping of on-site singlet pairs. We refine earlier renormalization group arguments and, using the density-matrix renormalization group method, numerically confirm their prediction that a spin gap opens at infinitesimal pair-hopping amplitude V > 0 in the one-dimensional tight-binding model. We also find a phase separation transition at a finite V > 0 as well as a spin-gap transition at a finite V < 0. The exotic magnetic behaviour of heavy-fermion materials involves an interplay between the screening of local moments from each other and the formation of a magnetic state of long range order. While the single-impurity Kondo Hamiltonian is thought to model some aspects of this behaviour, the properties of the Kondo lattice model away from half-filling are largely unknown. We determine the presence of a spin-gap region in the phase diagram of the one-dimensional Heisenberg-Kondo lattice model and make predictions about certain concealed dimerization order parameters.
Magnetic impurities coupled antiferromagnetically to a one-dimensional Heisenberg model are studied by numerical diagonalization of chains of finite clusters. By calculating the binding energy and the correlation function, it is shown that a local singlet develops around each impurity. This holds true for systems with a single impurity, with two impurities, and for impurities forming a lattice. The local character of the singlet is found to be little affected by the presence of other impurity spins. A small effective interaction is found between a pair of impurity spins, which oscillates depending on impurity distances. For impurity lattices, the energy spectrum shows a gap which is found to be much smaller than the binding energy per impurity if the coupling constants are small. For larger coupling constants, it increases to the same order of magnitude as the binding energy, indicating that a local singlet is broken to create excited states. Impurity lattices with ferromagnetic couplings are also studied and their connection to the Haldane problem is discussed.
The half-filled Hubbard model on the Bethe lattice with coordination number
z=3 is studied using the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method. Ground-state properties such as the energy
E, average local magnetization $ $, its fluctuations $ - ^2$ and various spin correlation functions $ - $ are determined as a function of the Coulomb interaction strength
U/t. The calculated local magnetic moments $ $ increase monotonically with increasing Coulomb repulsion
U/t forming an antiferromagnetic spin-density-wave state which matches the two sublattices of the bipartite Bethe lattice. At large
U/t, $ $ is strongly reduced with respect to the saturation value 1/2 due to exchange fluctuations between nearest neighbors (NN) spins (
∣∣≃0.35 for
U/t→+∞). $ - ^2$ shows a maximum for
U/t=2.4--2.9 which results from the interplay between the usual increase of $ $ with increasing
U/t and the formation of important permanent moments $ $ at large
U/t. NN sites show antiferromagnetic spin correlations which increase with increasing Coulomb repulsion. In contrast next NN sites are very weakly correlated over the whole range of
U/t. The accuracy of the DMRG results is discussed by comparison with tight-binding exact results, independent DMRG calculations for the Heisenberg model and simple first-order perturbation estimates.
The effect of a magnetic (S=1/2) impurity coupled to a two-dimensional system of correlated electrons (described by the t-J model) is studied by exact diagonalizations. It is found that, if the exchange coupling of the impurity with the neighboring spins is ferromagnetic or weakly antiferromagnetic, an extra hole can form bound states of different spatial symmetries with the impurity extending to a few lattice spacings. The binding energy is maximum when the impurity is completely decoupled (vacancy) and vanishes for an antiferromagnetic coupling exceeding \ensuremath{\sim}0.3J. Several peaks appear in the single-hole spectral function below the lower edge of the quasiparticle band as signatures of the d-, s-, and p-wave bound states.