Matrix Product Study of Spin Fractionalization in the 1D Kondo Insulator

Abstract

The Kondo lattice is one of the classic examples of strongly correlated electronic systems. We conduct a controlled study of the Kondo lattice in one dimension, highlighting the role of excitations created by the composite fermion operator. Using time-dependent matrix-product-state methods we compute various correlation functions and contrast them with both large-N mean-field theory and the strong-coupling expansion. We show that the composite fermion operator creates long-lived, charge-e and spin-1/2 excitations, which cover the low-lying single-particle excitation spectrum of the system. Furthermore, spin excitations can be thought to be composed of such fractionalized quasi-particles with a residual interaction which tend to disappear at weak Kondo coupling.