Non-Fermi liquid behaviour from dynamical effects of impurity scattering in correlated Fermi liquids

Abstract

The interplay of disorder and interactions is a subject of perennial interest. In this work, we have investigated the effect of disorder due to chemical substitution on the dynamics and transport properties of correlated Fermi liquids. A low frequency analysis in the concentrated and dilute limits shows that the dynamical local potentials arising through disorder averaging generate a linear (in frequency) term in the scattering rate. Such non-Fermi liquid behaviour (nFL) is investigated in detail for Kondo hole substitution in heavy fermions within dynamical mean field theory. We find closed form expressions for the dependence of the static and linear terms in the scattering rate on substitutional disorder and model parameters. We argue that the low temperature resistivity will acquire a linear in temperature term, and show that the Drude peak structure in the optical conductivity will disappear beyond a certain disorder $p_c$, that marks the crossover from lattice coherent to single-impurity behaviour. A full numerical solution of the DMFT equations reveals that the nFL term will show up significantly only in certain regimes, although it is present for any non-zero disorder concentration in principle. We highlight the dramatic changes that occur in the quasiparticle scattering rate in the proximity of $p_c$. Remarkably, we find that the nFL behaviour due to dynamical effects of impurity scattering has features that are distinct from those arising through Griffiths singularities or distribution of Kondo scales. Relevance of our findings to experiments on alloyed correlated systems is pointed out.

8 Pages, 4 figure

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• Spectral changes in layered $f$-electron systems induced by Kondo hole substitution in the boundary-layer
• Kondo-hole substitution in heavy fermions: dynamics and transport
• Breakdown of coherence in Kondo alloys: crucial role of concentration vs band filling
• Photo-emission signatures of coherence breakdown in Kondo alloys: dynamical mean-field theory approach