Non-Fermi-liquid behavior in quantum impurity models with superconducting channels

Abstract

We study how the non-Fermi-liquid nature of the overscreened multi-channel Kondo impurity model affects the response to a BCS pairing term that, in the absence of the impurity, opens a gap $\Delta$. We find that non-Fermi liquid features do persist even at finite $\Delta$: the local density of states lacks coherence peaks, the states in the continuum above the gap are unconventional, and the boundary entropy is a non-monotonic function of temperature. Even more surprisingly, we also find that the low-energy spectrum in the limit $\Delta\to 0$ actually does not correspond to the spectrum strictly at $\Delta=0$. In particular, the $\Delta\to 0$ ground state is an orbitally degenerate spin-singlet, while it is an orbital singlet with a residual spin degeneracy at $\Delta=0$. In addition, there are fractionalized spin-1/2 sub-gap excitations whose energy in units of $\Delta$ tends towards a finite and universal value when $\Delta\to 0$; as if the universality of the anomalous power-law exponents that characterise the overscreened Kondo effect turned into universal energy ratios when the scale invariance is broken by $\Delta\not=0$. This intriguing phenomenon can be explained by the renormalisation flow towards the overscreened fixed point and the gap cutting off the orthogonality catastrophe singularities.