Magnetic Quantum Phase Diagram of Magnetic Impurities in 2 Dimensional Disordered Electron Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the magnetic phase diagram of disordered 2D electron systems with magnetic impurities, revealing how disorder influences the competition between Kondo screening and RKKY interactions, leading to distinct magnetic phases.

Contribution

It provides a nonperturbative numerical analysis of the disordered quantum phase diagram, highlighting the distribution of Kondo temperatures and RKKY interactions, and identifies critical impurity densities and phases.

Findings

Distribution of TK and JRKKY are broad with a sharp cutoff.

Critical impurity density nc determines the dominant magnetic phase.

Disorder affects the stability of Kondo and spin-coupled phases.

Abstract

The quantum phase diagram of disordered electron systems as function of the concentration of magnetic impurities nm and the local exchange coupling J is studied in the dilute limit. We take into account the Anderson localisation of the electrons by a nonperturbative numerical treatment of the disorder potential. The competition between RKKY interaction JRKKY and the Kondo effect, as governed by the temperature scale TK, is known to gives rise to a rich magnetic quantum phase diagram, the Doniach diagram. Our numerical calculations show that in a disordered system both the Kondo temperature TK and JRKKY are widely distributed. Accordingly, also their ratio, JRKKY /TK is widely distributed as shown in Fig. 1 (a). However, we find a sharp cutoff of that distribution, which allows us to define a critical density of magnetic impurities nc below which Kondo screening wins at all sites of the system above a critical coupling Jc, forming the Kondo phase[see Fig. 1 (b)]. As disorder is increased, Jc increases and a spin coupled phase is found to grow at the expense of the Kondo phase. From these distribution functions we derive the magnetic susceptibility which show anomalous power law behavior. In the Kondo phase that power is determined by the wide distribution of the Kondo temperature, while in the spin coupled phase it is governed by the distribution of JRKKY. At low densities and small J < Jc we identify a paramagnetic phase. We also report results on a honeycomb lattice, graphene, where we find that the spin coupled phase is more stable against Kondo screening, but is more easily destroyed by disorder into a PM phase.