Critical hybridization for the Kondo resonance in gapless systems

Abstract

We study the Kondo resonance in a spin-1/2 single impurity Anderson model with a gapless conduction band using the equation of motion approach in order to obtain the impurity spectral function. We study two different scenarios for gapless systems: a purely power-law energy dependence of the density of states or a constant density of states with a gapless behavior near the Fermi level. We demonstrate that strong electron-electron correlations lead to a sharp peak in the impurity spectral function in the case of a large exchange coupling ($J>J_{c}$) or equivalently, a strong hybridization ($V>V_{c}$). This Kondo-like peak emerges much below the Fermi level in the case of a strongly depleted density of states. These results are compared with the ones from renormalization group approaches.