Many-body correlations and Majorana fermions in quantum impurity problems

Abstract

In this thesis we study the physical properties of quantum magnetic impurities in con- densed matter systems. More precisely, we are interested in the quantum many-body phenomena emerging in metallic quantum wires with spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in the presence of magnetic impurities. In particular, we investigate Kondo effect in topological superconducting quantum wires sustaining Majorana zero modes (MZMs) bound to their edges. The first part of this work is dedicated to a general digression on the formation of localized magnetic moments in solid state materials and the emergence of the Kondo effect in single-impurity systems. We further study a system composed by a single level quantum dot coupled to a metallic reservoir and to two MZMs with opposite polarizations. The system is described by a version of single impurity Anderson model (SIAM) adapted to account for the MZMs. To access the Kondo physics we used the projection approach to derive an effective Kondo-like Hamiltonian from the SIAM. We show the coexistence of the many-body Kondo singlet and a local Majorana singlet which results from the robustness of the Kondo fixed points even in the presence local Majorana operators. Moreover, we show that the free MZMs of the system are responsible for the impurity residual entropy S res = N/ 2 k B ln(2), where N is the number of free MZMs. This result reveals a fractional residual entropy for an odd number of free MZMs associated with a local non-Fermi liquid behavior. Both results were confirmed by the perturbative Anderson’s Poor Man’s scaling (PMS), and the nonperturbative Wilson’s numerical renormalization group (NRG). The second part of the thesis is dedicated to the low-temperature physics of two-impurity systems. We revisit the well known Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction between two spatially separated magnetic impurities in a quantum wire with SOC. To compute the RKKY coupling we use the original Ruderman-Kittel approach, based on the traditional second-order perturbation theory. This allows us find also the Dzaloshinskii-Moriya and Ising interactions between the impurities, both originated from the SOC. Our results show that due to momentum-spin-lock, provided by the SOC, the RKKY coupling does not decay with the inverse of the inter-impurities distance, as in the usual case. Instead, the coupling survives even at large distances oscillating with a characteristic wave-vector 2k R, where k R is proportional to the Rashba SOC.