Abstract
We study the Kondo physics of a spin- impurity in a noncentrosymmetric metal with spin-orbit interaction. Within a simple variational approach we compute ground-state properties of the system for an arbitrary form of spin-orbit coupling consistent with the crystal symmetry. This coupling produces an unscreened impurity magnetic moment and can lead to a significant change of the Kondo energy. We discuss implications of this finding both for dilute impurities and for heavy-fermion materials without inversion symmetry.
- Received 2 January 2012
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.85.081107
©2012 American Physical Society