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Published on: March 30, 2017
Non-Hermitian Kondo Effect in Ultracold Alkaline-Earth Atoms
Masaya Nakagawa1, Norio Kawakami2, Masahito Ueda1,3
1RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS), Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan.
Abstract:
We investigate the Kondo effect in an open quantum system, motivated by recent experiments with ultracold alkaline-earth(-like) atoms. Because of inelastic collisions and the associated atom losses, this system is described by a complex-valued Kondo interaction and provides a non-Hermitian extension of the Kondo problem. We show that the non-Hermiticity induces anomalous reversion of renormalization-group flows which violate the g theorem due to nonunitarity and produce a quantum phase transition unique to non-Hermiticity. Furthermore, we exactly solve the non-Hermitian Kondo Hamiltonian using a generalized Bethe ansatz method and find the critical line consistent with the renormalization-group flow.
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