Abstract We investigate the boundary phenomena that arise in a finite-size XX spin chain interacting through an XX interaction with a spin − 1 2 impurity located at its edge. Upon Jordan–Wigner transformation, the model is described by a quadratic Fermionic Hamiltonian. Our work displays, within this ostensibly simple model, the emergence of the Kondo effect, a quintessential hallmark of strongly correlated physics. We also show how the Kondo cloud shrinks and turns into a single particle bound state as the impurity coupling increases beyond a critical value. In more detail, using both Bethe Ansatz and exact diagonalization techniques, we show that the local moment of the impurity is screened by different mechanisms depending on the ratio of the boundary and bulk coupling J imp J . When the ratio falls below the critical value 2 , the impurity is screened via the Kondo effect. However, when the ratio between the coupling exceeds the critical value 2 an exponentially localized bound mode is formed at the impurity site which screens the spin of the impurity in the ground state. We show that the boundary phase transition is reflected in local ground state properties by calculating the spinon density of states, the magnetization at the impurity site in the presence of a global magnetic field, and the finite temperature susceptibility of the impurity. We find that the spinon density of states in the Kondo phase has the characteristic Lorentzian peak that moves from the Fermi level to the maximum energy of the spinon as the impurity coupling is increased and becomes a localized bound mode in the bound mode phase. Moreover, the impurity magnetization and the finite temperature impurity susceptibility behave differently in the two phases. When the boundary coupling J imp exceeds the critical value 2 J , the model is no longer boundary conformal invariant as a massive bound mode appears at the impurity site.
We derive a solvable resonant-level-type model, to describe an impurity spin coupled to zero-energy bound states localized at the edge of a one-dimensional d-wave superconductor.This results in a two-channel Kondo effect with a quite unusual low-temperature thermodynamics.For instance, the local impurity susceptibility yields a finite maximum at zero temperature (but no ln-divergence) due to the splitting of the impurity in two Majorana fermions.Moreover, we make comparisons with the Kondo effect occurring in a two-dimensional d-wave superconductor.
We discuss the dynamics of magnetic moments in d-wave superconductors. In particular, we focus on moments induced by doping nonmagnetic impurities into cuprates. The interaction of such moments with the Bogoliubov quasiparticles of the superconductors can be described by variants of the pseudogap Kondo model, characterized by a power-law density of states at the Fermi level. The numerical renormalization-group technique is employed to investigate this Kondo problem for realistic band structures and particle-hole asymmetries, both at zero and finite temperatures. In particular, we study the boundary quantum phase transition between the local-moment and asymmetric strong-coupling phases, and argue that this transition has been observed in recent nuclear magnetic resonance experiments. We determine the spectral properties of both phases and the location of the critical point as a function of Kondo coupling and doping, and discuss quantum-critical crossovers near this phase transition. In addition, changes in the local density of states around the impurity are calculated as functions of temperature, being relevant to scanning tunneling microscopy experiments.
The traditional multichannel Kondo effect takes place when several gapless metallic electronic channels interact with a localized spin-
S impurity, with the number of channels
n exceeding the size of the impurity spin,
n>2S, leading to the emergence of non-Fermi liquid impurity behavior at low temperatures. Here, we show that the effect can be realized even when the electronic degrees of freedom are strongly correlated and gapped. The system under consideration consists of a single spin-
21 impurity coupled isotropically to
n spin singlet superconducting channels realized by one-dimensional leads with quasi-long-range superconducting order. The competition between the Kondo and superconducting fluctuations induces multiple distinct ground states and boundary phases depending on the relative strengths of the bulk and boundary interactions. Using the Bethe Ansatz technique, we identify four regimes: an overscreened Kondo phase, a zero-mode phase, a Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) phase, and a local-moment phase with an unscreened impurity, each with its own experimental characteristic. We describe the renormalization-group flow, the excitation spectrum, and the full impurity thermodynamics in each phase. Remarkably, even in the presence of a bulk mass gap, the boundary critical behavior in the Kondo phase is governed by the same exponents as in the gapless theory with the low-energy impurity sector flowing to the
SU(2)n Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) fixed point, and the impurity entropy monotonically decreasing as a function of temperature. In both the overscreened Kondo and zero-mode phases, the residual impurity entropy is
Simp(T→0)=ln[2cos(π/(n+2))]. In the YSR and unscreened phases on the other hand the impurity entropy exhibits non-monotonic temperature dependence and is effectively free at low temperatures with
Simp(T→0)=ln2.
We study the low-temperature thermodynamics of a spin-
S magnetic impurity coupled to
m> 2 degenerate bands of interacting electrons in one dimension. By exploiting boundary-conformal-field-theory techniques, we derive exact results for the possible impurity thermal and magnetic response. The leading behavior of the impurity magnetic susceptibility is shown to be insensitive to the electron-electron interaction. In contrast, there are two types of scaling behavior of the impurity specific heat consistent with the symmetries of the problem: Either it remains the same as for the ordinary multichannel Kondo problem for noninteracting electrons or it acquires a new leading term governed by a critical exponent ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{m}{=(g}_{m}^{\ensuremath{-}1}\ensuremath{-}1)/m,$ where
gm< 1 is a generalized (
m channel) Luttinger-liquid charge parameter measuring the strength of the repulsive electron-electron interaction. We conjecture that the latter behavior is indeed realized when the impurity is exactly screened
(m=2S).In this work we consider several exactly solvable models of magnetic impurities in critical quantum antiferromagnetic spin chains and multichannel Kondo impurities. Their ground-state properties are studied, and the finite set of nonlinear integral equations which exactly describe the thermodynamics of the models is constructed. We obtain several analytical low-energy expressions for the temperature, magnetic field, and frequency dependences of important characteristics of exactly solvable disordered quantum spin models and disordered multichannel Kondo impurities with essential many-body interactions. We show that the only low-energy parameter that gets renormalized is the velocity of the low-lying excitations (or the effective crossover scale connected with each impurity); the others appear to be universal. In our study several kinds of strong disorder important for experiments were used. Some of them produce low divergences in certain characteristics of our strongly disordered critical systems (compared with finite values for the homogeneous case or a single impurity). For weak disorder, or for narrow distributions of the local Kondo temperatures, our exact results reveal the presence of Kondo screening of disordered ensembles of magnetic impurities by low-lying excitations of the host. We point out that our results qualitatively coincide with the data of experiments on real disordered quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnetic systems and with the similar behavior of some heavy metallic alloys.