Kondo effect driven by chirality imbalance

Suenaga, Daiki*; Suzuki, Kei; Araki, Yasufumi; Yasui, Shigehiro*

Physical Review Research (Internet), 2(2), p.023312_1 - 023312_13, 2020/06

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.023312

The Kondo effect is induced by the interaction between light fermions near the Fermi surface and heavy impurities, and it affects electric/thermal/transport properties of matter. The chirality (right-handed or left-handed) is one of the unique properties of relativistic (Dirac or Weyl) fermions. In normal matter, the numbers of right- and left-handed particles are equivalent to each other, but environments with a chirality imbalance can also be realized. In this paper, we theoretically propose the Kondo effect driven by a chirality imbalance (or chiral chemical potential) of relativistic light fermions. This effect is caused by the mixing between a right-handed (or left-handed) fermion and a heavy impurity in the chirality imbalanced matter. This is different from the usual Kondo effect induced by finite density (or chemical potential) for light fermions. We construct an effective model with an interaction between a relativistic fermion and a heavy impurity, and we derive the realization of the Kondo effect from both a perturbative calculation and a nonperturbative mean-field approach. We also discuss the temperature dependence, the coupling constant dependence, the susceptibilities, and the order of the phase transition for the Kondo effect. Such a Kondo effect will be tested by future lattice simulations.