Fermi surface and antiferromagnetism in the Kondo lattice: an asymptotically exact solution in d>1 dimensions

Interest in the heavy fermion metals has motivated us to examine the quantum phases and their Fermi surfaces within the Kondo lattice model. We demonstrate that the model is soluble asymptotically exactly in any dimension d>1, when the Kondo coupling is small compared with the RKKY interaction and in the presence of antiferromagnetic ordering. We show that the Kondo coupling is exactly marginal in the renormalization group sense, establishing the stability of an ordered phase with a small Fermi surface AFS. Our results have implications for the global phase diagram of the heavy fermion metals, suggesting a Lifshitz transition inside the antiferromagnetic region and providing a new perspective for a Kondo-destroying antiferromagnetic quantum critical point.     

Temperature dependence of the Kondo peak in photoemission spectra of YbAgCu4

Temperature dependent photoelectron spectra of the heavy fermion YbAgCu₄ show that the Kondo resonance is strongly depressed with increasing temperature. The observed reduction is fully consistent with the predictions of the Anderson impurity model, and reveals the transition from a Fermi liquid at low temperature to localized moments above the characteristic Kondo temperature. Despite this important experimental confirmation of the model, discrepancies exist between the experimental and calculated linewidth of the resonance. It is argued that a more realistic treatment of the photoemission process would improve the agreement between theory and experiment.     

重费密子体系的磁化率反常

作者之一提出重费密子体系是一种f电子可以随温度变化的Kondo体系,f电子被束缚在费密面附近的一个窄带上,由此模型,本文在理论上给出磁化率随温度的变化关系,统一地解释了磁化率的各种反常,理论的数值计算给出了八种重费密子的磁化率,它们都与实验曲线较好地符合,同时讨论了重费密子体系的磁化率对样品的依赖性。 关键词：     

Schwinger boson approach to the fully screened Kondo model

We apply the Schwinger boson scheme to the fully screened Kondo model and generalize the method to include antiferromagnetic interactions between ions. Our approach captures the Kondo crossover from local moment behavior to a Fermi liquid with a nontrivial Wilson ratio. When applied to the two-impurity model, the mean-field theory describes the "Varma-Jones" quantum phase transition between a valence bond state and a heavy Fermi liquid.     

Intersite coupling effects in a kondo lattice

The La dilution of the Kondo lattice CeCoIn5 is studied. The scaling laws found for the magnetic susceptibility and the specific heat reveal two well-separated energy scales, corresponding to the single-impurity Kondo temperature T(K) and an intersite spin-liquid temperature T(*). The Ce-dilute alloy has the expected Fermi liquid ground state, while the specific heat and resistivity in the dense Kondo regime exhibit non-Fermi-liquid behavior, which scales with T(*). These observations indicate that the screening of the magnetic moments in the lattice involves antiferromagnetic intersite correlations with a larger energy scale in comparison with the Kondo impurity case.     

Molecular Kondo resonance in atomic Fermi gases

The usual Kondo effect is associated with the formation of a many-body ground state that contains a quantum-mechanical entanglement between a (localized) fermion and the free fermions. We show, however, that also a bosonic form of the Kondo effect can occur in degenerate atomic Fermi gases near a Feshbach resonance, if the energy of the diatomic molecular level associated with the Feshbach resonance approaches twice the Fermi energy of the atoms.     

Kondo breakdown and hybridization fluctuations in the kondo-heisenberg lattice

We study the deconfined quantum critical point of the Kondo-Heisenberg lattice in three dimensions using a fermionic representation for the localized spins. The mean-field phase diagram exhibits a zero temperature quantum critical point separating a spin liquid phase where the hybridization vanishes and a Kondo phase where it does not. Two solutions can be stabilized in the Kondo phase: namely, a uniform hybridization when the band masses of the conduction electrons and the spinons have the same sign, and a modulated one when they have opposite sign. For the uniform case, we show that above a very small temperature scale, the critical fluctuations associated with the vanishing hybridization have dynamical exponent z=3, giving rise to a resistivity that has a TlogT behavior. We also find that the specific heat coefficient diverges logarithmically in temperature, as observed in a number of heavy fermion metals.     

Field induced magnetic ordering transition in Kondo insulators

We study the 2D Kondo insulators in a uniform magnetic field using quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the particle-hole symmetric Kondo lattice model and a mean field analysis of the Periodic Anderson model. We find that the field induces a transition to an insulating, antiferromagnetically ordered phase with staggered moment in the plane perpendicular to the field. For fields in excess of the quasi-particle gap, corresponding to a metal in a simple band picture of the periodic Anderson model, we find that the metallic phase is unstable towards the spin density wave type ordering for any finite value of the interaction strength. This can be understood as a consequence of the perfect nesting of the particle and hole Fermi surfaces that emerge as the field closes the gap. We propose a phase diagram and investigate the quasi-particle and charge excitations in the magnetic field. We find good agreement between the mean-field and quantum Monte Carlo results.Received: 17 December 2003, Published online: 8 June 2004PACS: 71.27. + a Strongly correlated electron systems; heavy fermions - 71.10.Fd Lattice fermion models (Hubbard model, etc.) - 71.30. + h Metal-insulator transitions and other electronic transitions - 75.30.Mb Valence fluctuation, Kondo lattice, and heavy-fermion phenomena - 75.30.Fv Spin-density waves     

Spectral densities of response functions for the O(3) symmetric Anderson and two channel Kondo models

The O(3) symmetric Anderson model is an example of a system which has a stable low energy marginal Fermi liquid fixed point for a certain choice of parameters. It is also exactly equivalent, in the large U limit, to a localized model which describes the spin degrees of freedom of the linear dispersion two channel Kondo model. We first use an argument based on conformal field theory to establish this precise equivalence with the two channel model. We then use the numerical renormalization group (NRG) approach to calculate both one-electron and two-electron response functions for a range of values of the interaction strength U. We compare the behaviours about the marginal Fermi liquid and Fermi liquid fixed points and interpret the results in terms of a renormalized Majorana fermion picture of the elementary excitations. In the marginal Fermi liquid case the spectral densities of all the Majorana fermion modes display a dependence on the lowest energy scale, and in addition the zero Majorana mode has a delta function contribution. The weight of this delta function is studied as a function of the interaction U and is found to decrease exponentially with U for large U. Using the equivalence with the two channel Kondo model in the large U limit, we deduce the dynamical spin susceptibility of the two channel Kondo model over the full frequency range. We use renormalized perturbation theory to interpret the results and to calculate the coefficient of the ln divergence found in the low frequency behaviour of the T=0 dynamic susceptibility. Received 29 January 1999     

Photoexcited electron dynamics in Kondo insulators and heavy fermions

We have studied the photoexcited carrier relaxation dynamics in the Kondo insulator SmB6 and the heavy fermion metal YbAgCu4 as a function of temperature and excitation level. The dynamic response is found to be both strongly temperature dependent and nonlinear. The data are analyzed with a Rothwarf-Taylor bottleneck model, where the dynamics are governed by the presence of a narrow gap in the density of states near the Fermi level. The remarkable agreement with the model suggests that carrier relaxation in a broad class of heavy electron systems (both metals and insulators) is governed by the presence of a (weakly temperature dependent) hybridization gap.     

Competition between Kondo and RKKY correlations in the presence of strong randomness

We propose that competition between Kondo and magnetic correlations results in a novel universality class for heavy fermion quantum criticality in the presence of strong randomness. Starting from an Anderson lattice model with disorder, we derive an effective local field theory in the dynamical mean-field theory approximation, where randomness is introduced into both hybridization and Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interactions. Performing the saddle-point analysis in the U(1) slave-boson representation, we reveal its phase diagram which shows a quantum phase transition from a spin liquid state to a local Fermi liquid phase. In contrast with the clean limit case of the Anderson lattice model, the effective hybridization given by holon condensation turns out to vanish, resulting from the zero mean value of the hybridization coupling constant. However, we show that the holon density becomes finite when the variance of the hybridization is sufficiently larger than that of the RKKY coupling, giving rise to the Kondo effect. On the other hand, when the variance of the hybridization becomes smaller than that of the RKKY coupling, the Kondo effect disappears, resulting in a fully symmetric paramagnetic state, adiabatically connected to the spin liquid state of the disordered Heisenberg model. We investigate the quantum critical point beyond the mean-field approximation. Introducing quantum corrections fully self-consistently in the non-crossing approximation, we prove that the local charge susceptibility has exactly the same critical exponent as the local spin susceptibility, suggesting an enhanced symmetry at the local quantum critical point. This leads us to propose novel duality between the Kondo singlet phase and the critical local moment state beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm. The Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson forbidden duality serves the mechanism of electron fractionalization in critical impurity dynamics, where such fractionalized excitations are identified with topological excitations.     

KONDO ANOMALIES OF THE HEAVY FERMION SYSTEMS

The interdependences of the Iow temperature properties in heavy fermion compounds with the Kondo lattice parameters are obtained from a two-conduction band periodic s-f exchange model by using the Green’s function method .The results indicate that the anomalous Iow temperature properties of the specific heat,resistivity and the static magnetic susceptibility in the heavy fermion systems are all the characteristic fea- tures of the Xondo Iattice. The influences of the pressure on the Kondo temperature TX and on the superconducting transition temperature T_C in the heavy fermion systems are also discussed.     

General properties of a magnetic-field-induced landau Fermi liquid in high-temperature superconductors and heavy fermion metals

It has been shown that the magnetic-field-induced transition from a non-Fermi-liquid state to a Fermi liquid state in the Tl₂Ba₂CuO_{6 + x} high-temperature superconductor is similar to a transition observed in heavy fermion metals. This behavior is explained in the theory of the Fermi condensate quantum-phase transition implying the existence of Landau quasiparticles. The Fermi condensate quantum-phase transition can be considered as a universal cause of the strongly correlated behavior observed in various metals and liquids such as high-temperature superconductors, heavy fermion metals, and two-dimensional Fermi systems.     

Transition in a Luttinger liquid with two-level impurities to the fermi-liquid state

The mechanisms leading to instability of the non-Fermi-liquid state of a Luttinger liquid with two-level impurities are proposed. Since exchange scattering in 1D systems is two-channel scattering in a certain range of parameters, several types of non-Fermi-liquid excitations with different quantum numbers exist in the vicinity of the Fermi level. These excitations include, first, charge density fluctuations in the Luttinger liquid and, second, many-particle excitations due to two-channel exchange interaction, which are associated with band-type as well as impurity fermion states. It is shown that mutual scattering of many-particle excitations of various types leads to the emergence of an additional Fermi-liquid singularity in the vicinity of the Fermi level. The conditions under which the Fermi-liquid state with a new energy scale (which is much smaller than the Kondo temperature) is the ground state of the system are formulated.     

Dimerization induced by the RKKY interaction

We report the presence of spin dimerization in the ground state of the one-dimensional Kondo lattice model at quarter filling. The emergence of this new phase of the Kondo lattice can be traced to the form of the RKKY interaction between the localized moments and provides the first example of dimerization induced indirectly by itinerant electrons. We propose this dimer ordering as the driving mechanism of the spin-Peierls phase observed in the quasi-one-dimensional organic compounds (Per)2M(mnt)(2) (M=Pt, Pd). Moreover, this suggests that a richer phase diagram than the Doniach paradigm may be needed to accommodate the physics of heavy fermion materials.     

Ce 基重费米子材料的电子态研究与维度调控

重费米子材料作为一类典型的强关联电子体系,蕴含着非常规超导、奇异金属、量子临界、 磁有序、重电子态、关联拓扑态等新奇的量子态,而4f 电子在其中扮演着重要的作用。随着高分 辨角分辨光电子能谱和薄膜生长技术的发展,精确探测重费米子材料中4f 电子在能量/动量空间 的色散和谱权重成为了可能,这为从微观上理解这类材料中的电子关联效应和新奇量子现象提供 了重要的基础。本论文总结了几个典型的重费米子单晶和薄膜体系的电子态研究,包括Ce-115 体 系、CeCu2Si2、CeRh6Ge4 以及单晶 Ce 膜等。这些结果为理解重费米子体系中重电子态的形成 和温度演化、近藤杂化的能带/动量依赖、重电子能带与超导的关系、近藤效应与磁性和其它量子 态的竞争、4f 电子的维度调控等重要物理问题提供了谱学证据。     

Single-Ion Kondo scaling of the coherent Fermi liquid regime in Ce(1-x)La(x)Ni2Ge2

Thermodynamic and transport properties of the La-diluted Kondo lattice CeNi(2)Ge(2) were studied in a wide temperature range. The Ce-rich alloys Ce(1-x)La(x)Ni(2)Ge(2) were found to exhibit distinct features of the coherent heavy Fermi liquid. At intermediate compositions (0.7≤x≤0.9), non-Fermi liquid properties have been observed, followed by the local Fermi liquid behavior in the dilute limit. The 4f-electron contribution to the specific heat was found to follow the predictions of the Kondo-impurity model in both the local as well as the coherent regimes, with the characteristic Kondo temperature decreasing rapidly from about 30 K for the parent compound CeNi(2)Ge(2) to about 1 K in the most dilute samples. The specific heat does not show any evidence for the emergence of a new characteristic energy scale related to the formation of the coherent Kondo lattice.     

Low temperature electron spin resonance of the Kondo ion in a heavy fermion metal: YbRh2Si2

We report an electron spin resonance (ESR) study on single crystals of the heavy fermion metal YbRh2Si2 which shows pronounced non-Fermi liquid behavior related to a close antiferromagnetic quantum critical point. It is shown that the observed ESR spectra can be ascribed to a bulk Yb3+ resonance. This is the first observation of ESR of the Kondo ion itself in a dense Kondo lattice system. The ESR signal occurs below the Kondo temperature (T(K)) which thus indicates the existence of large unscreened Yb3+ moments below T(K). We observe the spin dynamics as well as the static magnetic properties of the Yb3+ spins to be consistent with the results of nuclear magnetic resonance and magnetic susceptibility.