Stability of insulating phase in the chiral Kondo lattice model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of the insulating phase in a 1D chiral Kondo lattice model at half-filling, revealing that even minimal interactions can induce a transition from conducting to insulating behavior.

Contribution

It demonstrates that small interactions can stabilize the insulating phase in the chiral Kondo lattice model, challenging assumptions about the robustness of conducting states.

Findings

Small interactions induce insulating phase

Chirality does not prevent insulating transition

Insulating phase stable at half-filling

Abstract

In this work, the stability of the insulating phase of the 1D chiral Kondo lattice model is studied at half-filling, within the framework of self-consistent variational theory. It is found that arbitrarily small interaction would drive the system from a conducting phase to an insulating phase, in spite of the chirality of the conducting band.