Local Kondo temperatures in atomic chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder affects local Kondo temperatures in atomic chains, revealing that weak disorder can increase Kondo temperatures and create a distribution of local screening effects, with implications for experimental observation.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach combining slave-boson theory and scattering matrix analysis to study disorder effects on Kondo temperatures in atomic chains, highlighting local variations.

Findings

Disorder induces non-screened Kondo couplings in atomic chains.

Weak disorder increases the overall Kondo temperature.

Local distributions of Kondo temperatures emerge along the chain.

Abstract

We study the effect of disorder in strongly interacting small atomic chains. Using the Kotliar- Ruckenstein slave-boson approach we diagonalize the Hamiltonian via scattering matrix theory. We numerically solve the Kondo transmission and the slave-boson parameters that allow us to calculate the Kondo temperature. We demonstrate that in the weak disorder regime, disorder in the energy levels of the dopants induces a non-screened disorder in the Kondo couplings of the atoms. We show that disorder increases the Kondo temperature of a perfect chain. We find that this disorder in the couplings comes from a local distribution of Kondo temperatures along the chain. We propose two experimental setups where the impact of local Kondo temperatures can be observed.