Asymmetry effects on the phases of RKKY-coupled two-impurity Kondo systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how asymmetries influence phase transitions in RKKY-coupled two-impurity Kondo systems, revealing robustness against certain asymmetries and the emergence of crossovers with charge transfer.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing the effects of various asymmetries and charge transfer on phase transitions in two-impurity Kondo models, identifying conditions for robustness and crossover behavior.

Findings

Transitions are robust against coupling and particle-hole asymmetries with no charge transfer.

Charge transfer induces crossovers instead of sharp phase transitions.

Qualitative physics persists at non-zero temperature with small inter-host hopping.

Abstract

In a related work [arXiv:2106.07519] we have shown that in the two-impurity Anderson (2iA) model with two hosts coupled by spin exchange in the most symmetric case there are either two phase transitions or none. The phases comprise the conventional Kondo and RKKY regimes and a novel one, interpreted as a Kondo-stabilized, metallic quantum spin liquid (QSL). Here we analyze how various types of asymmetry affect this picture. We demonstrate that the transitions are robust against the coupling and particle-hole asymmetries, provided charge transfer is forbidden. This holds true despite the scattering phase shift at each impurity taking non-universal values. Finally, for an extended model including charge transfer between the hosts and a small Coulomb interaction at the host sites directly coupled to impurities, we show that the presence of charge transfer changes the phase transitions into crossovers. Provided the inter-host hopping is sufficiently small, this leads to qualitatively the same physics at non-zero temperature. The relevance of this model for rare-earth atoms in a metallic host is discussed and potential experimental setups for observing our findings are proposed.