Magnon Bose-Einstein Condensation and Superconductivity in a Frustrated Kondo Lattice

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on magnetically frustrated heavy fermion metals, we theoretically study the phase diagram of the Kondo lattice model with a nonmagnetic valence bond solid ground state on a ladder. A similar physical setting may be naturally occurring in YbAl${}_3$C${}_3$, CeAgBi${}_2$, and TmB${}_4$ compounds. In the insulating limit, the application of a magnetic field drives a quantum phase transition to an easy-plane antiferromagnet, which is described by a Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. Using a combination of field theoretical techniques and density matrix renormalization group calculations we demonstrate that in one dimension this transition is stable in the presence of a metallic Fermi sea and its universality class in the local magnetic response is unaffected by the itinerant gapless fermions. Moreover, we find that fluctuations about the valence bond solid ground state can mediate an attractive interaction that drives unconventional superconducting correlations. We discuss the extensions of our findings to higher dimensions and argue that, depending on the filling of conduction electrons, the magnon Bose-Einstein condensation transition can remain stable in a metal also in dimensions two and three.

6 pages + Supplementary

References in corpus (10)

• Fermi-liquid instabilities at magnetic quantum phase transitions
• Bose-Einstein Condensation in Magnetic Insulators
• Heavy Fermions and Quantum Phase Transitions
• Quantum magnetism and criticality
• Quantum Criticality
• Frustration and the Kondo effect in heavy fermion materials
• Characteristic signatures of quantum criticality driven by geometrical frustration
• Condensation of magnons and spinons in a frustrated ladder
• Robust d-wave Pairing Correlations in the Heisenberg Kondo Lattice Model
• Magnon Bose-Einstein Condensation and Superconductivity in a Frustrated Kondo Lattice

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Quantum phase transitions and composite excitations of antiferromagnetic spin trimer chains in a magnetic field
• Pair density wave, unconventional superconductivity, and non-Fermi liquid quantum critical phase in frustrated Kondo lattice
• Magnon Bose-Einstein Condensation and Superconductivity in a Frustrated Kondo Lattice