Scale dependence of the Kondo interaction in the functional renormalization group formalism

Abstract

Scale evolution of interactions between a Weyl fermion and a heavy magnetic impurity is calculated non-perturbatively using the functional renormalization group technique. Using an expansion around the vanishing pairing gap, we derive the flow equations for all possible quartic couplings in the system. We find that contrary to conventional perturbation theory, the usual spin-spin isotropic interaction necessarily splits into two invariant parts during the scale evolution, which are fully allowed by the $SU(2)$ spin-rotation symmetry. We also find the existence of an infrared stable interacting fixed point, which can be responsible for intermediate-coupling screening effects. The calculation scheme presented here is rather general and expected to be easily applicable to various spin-spin-like interactions in fermionic systems.