Abstract
We study a model of correlated electrons coupled by tunnelling to a layer of itinerant metallic electrons, which allows to interpolate from a frustrated limit favorable to spin liquid states to a Kondo-lattice limit favorable to interlayer coherent heavy metallic states. We study the competition of the spinon fermi surface state and the interlayer coherent heavy Kondo metal that appears with increasing tunnelling. Employing a slave rotor mean-field approach, we obtain a phase diagram and describe two regimes where the spin liquid state is destroyed by weak interlayer tunnelling, (i) the Kondo limit in which the correlated electrons can be viewed as localized spin moments and (ii) near the Mott metal-insulator-transition where the spinon Fermi surface transitions continuously into a Fermi liquid. We study the shape of LDOS spectra of the putative spin liquid layer in the heavy Fermi liquid phase and describe the temperature dependence of its width arising from quasiparticle interactions and disorder effects throughout this phase diagram, in an effort to understand recent STM experiments of the candidate spin liquid 1T-TaSe$_2$ residing on metallic 1H-TaSe$_2$. Comparison of the shape and temperature dependence of the theoretical and experimental LDOS suggest that this system is either close to the localized Kondo limit, or in an intermediate coupling regime where the Kondo coupling and the Heisenberg exchange interaction are comparable.
Highlights
Since the pioneering proposal by Anderson [1,2,3], there has been an extensive quest to find quantum spin liquids (QSL) in materials [4,5,6]
This model interpolates naturally between the periodic Anderson model where it would capture the physics of the formation of the interlayer coherent heavy Kondo metal [22,23] and the pure Hubbard limit (V → 0) where it would capture the traditional scenario for the appearance of the spinon Fermi-surface state near the Mott transition [24,25,26]
We have studied a model of coupled correlated and itinerant electrons which naturally interpolates between the periodic Anderson model and the Hubbard model
Summary
Since the pioneering proposal by Anderson [1,2,3], there has been an extensive quest to find quantum spin liquids (QSL) in materials [4,5,6]. This model interpolates naturally between the periodic Anderson model (td → 0) where it would capture the physics of the formation of the interlayer coherent heavy Kondo metal [22,23] and the pure Hubbard limit (V → 0) where it would capture the traditional scenario for the appearance of the spinon Fermi-surface state near the Mott transition [24,25,26]. In Appendix B we revisit the classic result of the temperature dependence of the single impurity Anderson model and give a more thorough derivation of the width of the Kondo resonance
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