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Between the nano- and micrometre scales, the collective behaviour of matter can give rise to startling emergent properties that hint at the nexus between biology and physics.Comment: Archival copy of Nature Connections Articl

Electron Cotunneling into a Kondo Lattice

Motivated by recent experimental interest in tunneling into heavy electron materials, we present a theory for electron tunneling into a Kondo lattice. The passage of an electron into the Kondo lattice is accompanied by a simultaneous spin flip of the localized moments via cotunneling mechanism. We compute the tunneling current with the large-$N$ mean field theory. In the absence of disorder, differential tunneling conductance exhibits two peaks separated by the hybridization gap. Disorder effects lead to the smearing of the gap resulting in a Fano lineshape.Comment: 4 pages, 2 eps figure

Transport anomalies in a simplified model for a heavy electron quantum critical point

We discuss the transport anomalies associated with the development of heavy electrons out of a neutral spin fluid using the large-N treatment of the Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model. At the phase transition in this model the spin excitations suddenly acquire charge. The Higgs process by which this takes place causes the constraint gauge field to loosely ``lock'' together with the external, electromagnetic gauge field. From this perspective, the heavy fermion phase is a Meissner phase in which the field representing the difference between the electromagnetic and constraint gauge field, is excluded from the material. We show that at the transition into the heavy fermion phase, both the linear and the Hall conductivity jump together. However, the Drude weight of the heavy electron fluid does not jump at the quantum critical point, but instead grows linearly with the distance from the quantum critical point, forming a kind of ``gossamer'' Fermi-liquid.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures. Small change in references in v

Itinerant and localized states in strongly correlated systems by a modified mean-field slave-boson approach

The standard mean field slave-boson solution for the infinite-$U$ Hubbard model is revised. A slightly modified version is proposed which includes properly the incoherent contribution of the localized states. In contrast to the standard mean field result, this new proposed solution defines a unique spectral function to be used in the calculation of local and not local quantities, and satisfies the correct thermodynamic relations. The same approach is applied also to the mean field approximation in terms of Hubbard operators. As a byproduct of this analysis, Luttinger's theorem is shown to be fulfilled in a natural way.Comment: 2 eps figure enclosed, IJMP B style, accepted for publication on Int. Journ. Mod. Phys.

Kondo resonance narrowing in d- and f-electron systems

By developing a simple scaling theory for the effect of Hund's interactions on the Kondo effect, we show how an exponential narrowing of the Kondo resonance develops in magnetic ions with large Hund's interaction. Our theory predicts an exponential reduction of the Kondo temperature with spin S of the Hund's coupled moment, a little-known effect first observed in d-electron alloys in the 1960's, and more recently encountered in numerical calculations on multi-band Hubbard models with Hund's interactions. We discuss the consequences of Kondo resonance narrowing for the Mott transition in d-band materials, particularly iron pnictides, and the narrow ESR linewidth recently observed in ferromagnetically correlated f-electron materials.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Two-fluid behavior of the Kondo lattice in the 1/N slave boson approach

It has been recently shown by Nakatsuji, Pines, and Fisk [S. Nakatsuji, D. Pines, and Z. Fisk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 016401 (2004)] from the phenomenological analysis of experiments in Ce1-xLaxCoIn5 and CeIrIn5 that thermodynamic and transport properties of Kondo lattices below coherence temperature can be very successfully described in terms of a two-fluid model, with Kondo impurity and heavy electron Fermi liquid contributions. We analyze thermodynamic properties of Kondo lattices using 1/N slave boson treatment of the periodic Anderson model and show that these two contributions indeed arise below the coherence temperature. We find that the Kondo impurity contribution to thermodynamics corresponds to thermal excitations into the flat portion of the energy spectrum.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure