The Mesoscopic Kondo Box: A Mean-Field Approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates the mesoscopic Kondo box using a mean-field approach, revealing parity-dependent effects on magnetic and conductance properties that are experimentally observable.

Contribution

It introduces a mean-field method to analyze the mesoscopic Kondo problem, enabling efficient study of parity effects on physical observables.

Findings

Pronounced parity effects in magnetic susceptibility and conductance.

Parity-dependent distributions of physical quantities.

Feasible experimental detection of parity effects.

Abstract

We study the mesoscopic Kondo box, consisting of a quantum spin 1/2 interacting with a chaotic electronic bath as can be realized by a magnetic impurity coupled to electrons on a quantum dot, using a mean-field approach for the Kondo interaction. Its umerical efficiency allows us to analyze the Kondo temperature, the local magnetic susceptibility, and the conductance statistics for a large number of samples with energy levels obtained by random matrix theory. We see pronounced parity effects in the average values and in the probability distributions, depending on an even and odd electronic occupation of the quantum dot, respectively. These parity effects are directly accessible in experiments.