Ground State Properties of Anderson Impurity in a Gapless Host

Abstract

Using the Bethe ansatz method, we study the ground state properties of a $U\to\infty$ Anderson impurity in a ``gapless'' host, where a density of band states vanishes at the Fermi level $ε_F$ as $|ε-ε_F|$. As in metals, the impurity spin is proven to be screened at arbitrary parameters of the system. However, the impurity occupancy as a function of the bare impurity energy is shown to acquire novel qualitative features which demonstrate a nonuniversal behavior of the system. The latter explains why the Kondo screening is absent (or exists only at quite a large electron-impurity coupling) in earlier studies based on scaling arguments.