Magnon Bose-Einstein Condensation and Superconductivity in a Frustrated Kondo Lattice

TL;DR

This paper explores the phase diagram of a frustrated Kondo lattice model, revealing magnon Bose-Einstein condensation, stable quantum phase transitions, and potential for unconventional superconductivity in heavy fermion materials.

Contribution

It demonstrates the stability of magnon Bose-Einstein condensation in the presence of a metallic Fermi sea and shows how valence bond fluctuations can induce superconductivity.

Findings

Magnon BEC transition remains stable with gapless fermions in 1D.

Valence bond fluctuations mediate attractive interactions leading to superconductivity.

Transition stability potentially extends to higher dimensions depending on electron filling.

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on magnetically frustrated heavy fermion metals, we theoretically study the phase diagram of the Kondo lattice model with a nonmagnetic valence bond solid ground state on a ladder. A similar physical setting may be naturally occurring in YbAl$_3$C$_3$, CeAgBi$_2$, and TmB$_4$ compounds. In the insulating limit, the application of a magnetic field drives a quantum phase transition to an easy-plane antiferromagnet, which is described by a Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. Using a combination of field theoretical techniques and density matrix renormalization group calculations we demonstrate that in one dimension this transition is stable in the presence of a metallic Fermi sea and its universality class in the local magnetic response is unaffected by the itinerant gapless fermions. Moreover, we find that fluctuations about the valence bond solid ground state can mediate an attractive interaction that drives unconventional superconducting correlations. We discuss the extensions of our findings to higher dimensions and argue that, depending on the filling of conduction electrons, the magnon Bose-Einstein condensation transition can remain stable in a metal also in dimensions two and three.