Non-Fermi-liquid behavior in quantum impurity models with superconducting channels

Article

关键词: NUMERICAL RENORMALIZATION-GROUP;    CONFORMAL-FIELD-THEORY;    2-CHANNEL KONDO MODEL;    MAGNETIC-IMPURITIES;    SINGLE-CHANNEL;    ANDERSON MODEL;    FIXED-POINTS;    STATES;    CROSSOVER;    THERMODYNAMICS;   

DOI  :  10.1103/PhysRevB.95.085121

来源: SCIE

【 摘 要 】

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 Delta. We find that the low-energy spectrum in the limit Delta -> 0 actually does not correspond to the spectrum strictly at Delta = 0. In particular, in the two-channel Kondo model, the Delta -> 0 ground state is an orbitally degenerate spin singlet, while it is an orbital singlet with a residual spin degeneracy at Delta = 0. In addition, there are fractionalized spin-1/2 subgap excitations whose energy in units of Delta tends toward a finite and universal value when Delta -> 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 Delta not equal 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 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.

【 授权许可】

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