Simulating realistic screening clouds around quantum impurities: role of spatial anisotropy and disorder

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient algorithm for simulating large-scale quantum impurity screening clouds, revealing anisotropic spatial correlations and the impact of disorder on Kondo physics in metallic lattices.

Contribution

The authors develop a robust recursive natural orbital algorithm that enables detailed simulation of screening clouds in large disordered lattices, capturing anisotropy and disorder effects.

Findings

Strong anisotropy in spatial correlations around an adatom.

Disorder shortens the charge screening cloud but preserves long-range Kondo correlations in rare cases.

The method achieves accurate results on lattices with tens of thousands of sites.

Abstract

Dynamical quantum impurities in metals induce electronic correlations in real space that are difficult to simulate due to their multi-scale nature, so that only s-wave scattering in clean metallic hosts has been investigated so far. However, screening clouds should show anisotropy due to lack of full rotational invariance in two- and three-dimensional lattices, while inherent disorder will also induce spatial inhomogeneities. To tackle these challenges, we present an efficient and robust algorithm based on the recursive generation of natural orbitals defined as eigenvectors of the truncated single-particle density matrix. This method provides well-converged many-body wave functions on lattices with up to tens of thousands of sites, bypassing some limitations of other approaches. The algorithm is put to the test by investigating the charge screening cloud around an interacting resonant level, both on clean and disordered lattices, achieving accurate spatial resolution from short to long distances. We thus demonstrate strong anisotropy of spatial correlations around an adatom in the half-filled square lattice. Taking advantage of the efficiency of the algorithm, we further compute the disorder-induced distribution of Kondo temperatures over several thousands of random realizations, at the same time gaining access to the full spatial profile of the screening cloud in each sample. While the charge screening cloud is typically shortened due to the polarization of the impurity by the disorder potential, we surprisingly find that rare disorder configurations preserve the long range nature of Kondo correlations in the electronic bath.