Mirages and many-body effects in quantum corrals

Abstract

In the experiment of the quantum mirage, confinement of surface states in an elliptical corral has been used to project the Kondo effect from one focus where a magnetic impurity was placed, to the other empty focus. The signature of the Kondo effect is seen as a Fano antiresonance in scanning tunneling spectroscopy. This experiment combines the many-body physics of the Kondo effect with the subtle effects of confinement. In this work we review the essential physics of the quantum mirage experiment, and present new calculations involving other geometries and more than one impurity in the corral, which should be relevant for other experiments that are being made, and to discern the relative importance of the hybridization of the impurity with surface Vs and bulk Vb states. The intensity of the mirage imposes a lower bound to Vs/Vb which we estimate. Our emphasis is on the main physical ingredients of the phenomenon and the many-body aspects, like the dependence of the observed differential conductance with geometry, which cannot be calculated with alternative one-body theories. The system is described with an Anderson impurity model solved using complementary approaches: perturbation theory in the Coulomb repulsion U, slave bosons in mean field and exact diagonalization plus embedding.