Disorder-quenched Kondo effect in mesosocopic electronic systems

Abstract

Nonmagnetic disorder is shown to quench the screening of magnetic moments in metals, the Kondo effect. The probability that a magnetic moment remains free down to zero temperature is found to increase with disorder strength. Experimental consequences for disordered metals are studied. In particular, it is shown that the presence of magnetic impurities with a small Kondo temperature enhances the electron's dephasing rate at low temperatures in comparison to the clean metal case. It is furthermore proven that the width of the distribution of Kondo temperatures remains finite in the thermodynamic (infinite volume) limit due to wave function correlations within an energy interval of order $1/\tau$, where $\tau$ is the elastic scattering time. When time-reversal symmetry is broken either by applying a magnetic field or by increasing the concentration of magnetic impurities, the distribution of Kondo temperatures becomes narrower.

17 pages, 7 figures, new results on Kondo effect in quasi-1D wires added, 6 Refs. added

References in corpus (11)

• Disorder-Driven Non-Fermi Liquid Behavior of Correlated Electrons
• Theory of inelastic scattering from magnetic impurities
• Universal dephasing rate due to diluted Kondo impurities
• Scaling of the low temperature dephasing rate in Kondo systems
• Magnetic Field Dependence of Dephasing Rate due to Diluted Kondo Impurities
• Mesoscopic Kondo Problem
• Electronic coherence in metals: comparing weak localization and time-dependent conductance fluctuations
• Mesoscopic Fluctuations in Quantum Dots in the Kondo Regime
• g-Factors and Discrete Energy Level Velocities in Nanoparticles
• Statistics of Wave Functions in Disordered Systems with Applications to Coulomb Blockade Peak Spacing
• Conductance Peak Height Correlations for a Coulomb-Blockaded Quantum Dot in a Weak Magnetic Field

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Many-Body Physics and Quantum Chaos
• Nonperturbative Scaling Theory of Free Magnetic Moment Phases in Disordered Metals
• Electron coherence at low temperatures: The role of magnetic impurities
• Ground State and Excitations of Quantum Dots with "Magnetic Impurities"
• Low-temperature electron dephasing time in AuPd revisited
• Low temperature dephasing in irradiated metallic wires