Ground States and Excitations of Magnetic Impurities in Pseudogap Superconducting Systems

Abstract

Combining effective field theory and numerical renormalization-group (NRG), we study the ground-state phase diagram and single-particle excitations of a spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ impurity in a superconducting system with a tunneling density of states behaving as $ρ(ε) \sim |ε|^{r}$, for $|ε|\gg Δ$ ($Δ$ being the $s$-wave pairing potential). We focus on the properties of the doublet-singlet transition at large Kondo coupling. The effective field theory for the singlet phase is inferred from a strong coupling expansion in the Kondo coupling. For $Δ\neq 0$, it contains a local pairing term which drives the system into a spin-singlet phase with enhanced paring correlations. We study how the singet-doublet phase boundary is affected by particle-hole symmetry breaking perturbations such as a scattering potential and/or the chemical potential. Results for the $T$-matrix spectral function are also reported near the transition both at particle-hole symmetry and away from it. It is shown that the singlet-doublet transition can be induced by the chemical potential rather than the Kondo coupling strength. At particle-hole symmetry, a resonance-like feature is observed for $r= 1$ and related to a two-quasiparticle excitation using a single-site model which is derived from effective field theory.