Many-body band structure and Fermi surface of the Kondo lattice

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical theory for the single particle excitations and Fermi surface of the Kondo lattice, capturing the evolution from insulator to heavy electron metal with good agreement to numerical results.

Contribution

It introduces a simple, effective Hamiltonian approach analogous to linear spin wave theory, enabling analytical calculations of the Kondo lattice's spectral properties.

Findings

Spectral functions match exact diagonalization results.

F-electrons participate in the Fermi surface even when localized.

The theory captures doping dependence and spectral weight transfer.

Abstract

We present a theory for the single particle excitations and Fermi surface of the Kondo lattice. Thereby we construct an effective Hamiltonian describing the creation and propagation of single particle-like charge fluctuations on an `RVB-background' of local singlets. The theory may be viewed as a `Fermionic version' of linear spin wave theory and is of comparable simplicity, so that the calculations for the strong-coupling limit can be performed analytically. We calculate the single particle spectral function for the standard Kondo lattice as well as for several extended versions: with a Coulomb repulsion between conduction and f-electrons, Coulomb repulsion between conduction electrons, and a `breathing' f-orbital. In all cases we study the evolution of the spectrum in going from the Kondo insulator to the Heavy electron metal. We compare our results to exact diagonalization of small clusters and find remarkable agreement in nearly all cases studied. In the metallic case the f-electrons participate in the Fermi surface volume even if they are replaced by localized Kondo-spins and the number of bands, their dispersion and spectral character, and the nontrivial (i.e. non-rigid band-like) doping dependence including a pronounced transfer of spectral weight are reproduced by the theory.