Local Defect in Metallic Quantum Critical Systems

Abstract

We present a theory of a single point, line or plane defect coupling to the square of the order parameter in a metallic system near a quantum critical point at or above its upper critical dimension. At criticality, a spin droplet is nucleated around the defect with droplet core size determined by the strength of the defect potential. Outside the core a universal slowly decaying tail of the droplet is found, leading to many dissipative channels coupling to the droplet and to a complete suppression of quantum tunneling. We propose an NMR experiment to measure the impurity-induced changes in the local spin susceptibility.