No Arabic abstract
We study the non-interacting two-impurity Anderson model on a lattice using the Green function equation-of-motion method. A case of particular interest is the RKKY limit that is characterized by a small hybridization between impurities and host electrons and the absence of a direct coupling between the impurities. In contrast to the low-density case, at half band-filling and particle-hole symmetry, the RKKY interaction decays as the inverse square of the impurity distance along the axis of a simple cubic lattice. In the RKKY limit, for the spectral function we generically observe a small splitting of the single-impurity resonance into two peaks. For a vanishing density-density correlation function of the host electrons, we find only a broadened single peak in the local density of states.
We study Gutzwiller-correlated wave functions as variational ground states for the two-impurity Anderson model (TIAM) at particle-hole symmetry as a function of the impurity separation ${bf R}$. Our variational state is obtained by applying the Gutzwiller many-particle correlator to a single-particle product state. We determine the optimal single-particle product state fully variationally from an effective non-interacting TIAM that contains a direct electron transfer between the impurities as variational degree of freedom. For a large Hubbard interaction $U$ between the electrons on the impurities, the impurity spins experience a Heisenberg coupling proportional to $V^2/U$ where $V$ parameterizes the strength of the on-site hybridization. For small Hubbard interactions we observe weakly coupled impurities. In general, for a three-dimensional simple cubic lattice we find discontinuous quantum phase transitions that separate weakly interacting impurities for small interactions from singlet pairs for large interactions.
We study the particle-hole asymmetry of the scattering rate in strongly correlated electron systems by examining the cubic $omega^3$ and $omega T^2$ terms in the imaginary part of the self-energy of the Anderson impurity model. We show that the sign is opposite in the weak-coupling and strong-coupling limits, explaining the differences found in theoretical approaches taking the respective limits as the starting points. The sign change in fact precisely delineates the cross-over between the weak and strong correlation regimes of the model. For weak interaction $U$ the sign reversal occurs for small values of the doping $delta=1-n$, while for interaction of order $U approx 2 Gamma$, $Gamma$ being the hybridization strength, the cross-over curve rapidly shifts to the large-doping range. This curve based on the impurity dynamics is genuinely different from other cross-over curves defined through impurity thermodynamic and static properties.
We investigate static and dynamical ground-state properties of the two-impurity Anderson model at half filling in the limit of vanishing impurity separation using the dynamical density-matrix renormalization group method. In the weak-coupling regime, we find a quantum phase transition as function of inter-impurity hopping driven by the charge degrees of freedom. For large values of the local Coulomb repulsion, the transition is driven instead by a competition between local and non-local magnetic correlations. We find evidence that, in contrast to the usual phenomenological picture, it seems to be the bare effective exchange interactions which trigger the observed transition.
We study the zero-bandwidth limit of the two-impurity Anderson model in an antiferromagnetic (AF) metal. We calculate, for different values of the model parameters, the lowest excitation energy, the magnetic correlation $<mathbf{S}_{1}mathbf{S}_{2}>$ between the impurities, and the magnetic moment at each impurity site, as a function of the distance between the impurities and the temperature. At zero temperature, in the region of parameters corresponding to the Kondo regime of the impurities, we observe an interesting competition between the AF gap and the Kondo physics of the two impurities. When the impurities are close enough, the AF splitting governs the physics of the system and the local moments of the impurities are frozen, in a state with very strong ferromagnetic correlation between the impurities and roughly independent of the distance. On the contrary, when the impurities are sufficiently far apart and the AF gap is not too large, the scenario of the Kondo physics take place: non-magnetic ground state and the possibility of spin-flip excitation emerges and the ferromagnetic $<mathbf{S}_{1}mathbf{S}_{2}>$ decreases as the distance increases, but the complete decoupling of the impurities never occurs. In adition, the presence of the AF gap gives a non-zero magnetic moment at each impurity site, showing a non complete Kondo screening of the impurities in the system. We observe that the residual magnetic moment decreases when the distance between the impurities is increased.
We present an extensive study of the two-impurity Kondo problem for spin-1 adatoms on square lattice using an exact canonical transformation to map the problem onto an effective one-dimensional system that can be numerically solved using the density matrix renormalization group method. We provide a simple intuitive picture and identify the different regimes, depending on the distance between the two impurities, Kondo coupling $J_K$, longitudinal anisotropy $D$, and transverse anisotropy $E$. In the isotropic case, two impurities on opposite(same) sublattices have a singlet(triplet) ground state. However, the energy difference between the triplet ground state and the singlet excited state is very small and we expect an effectively four-fold degenerate ground state, i.e., two decoupled impurities. For large enough $J_K$ the impurities are practically uncorrelated forming two independent underscreened states with the conduction electrons, a clear non-perturbative effect. When the impurities are entangled in an RKKY-like state, Kondo correlations persists and the two effects coexist: the impurities are underscreened, and the dangling spin-$1/2$ degrees of freedom are responsible for the inter-impurity entanglement. We analyze the effects of magnetic anisotropy in the development of quasi-classical correlations.