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Kondo proximity effect: how does a metal penetrate into a Mott insulator?
R W Helmes1, T A Costi, A Rosch
1Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne, 50937 Cologne, Germany.
Abstract:
We consider a heterostructure of a metal and a paramagnetic Mott insulator using an adaptation of dynamical mean-field theory to describe inhomogeneous systems. The metal can penetrate into the insulator via the Kondo effect. We investigate the scaling properties of the metal-insulator interface close to the critical point of the Mott insulator. At criticality, the quasiparticle weight decays as 1/x;{2} with distance x from the metal within our mean-field theory. Our numerical results (using the numerical renormalization group as an impurity solver) show that the prefactor of this power law is extremely small.
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