Continuous ferromagnetic quantum phase transition on an anisotropic Kondo lattice

Abstract

Motivated by the recent discovery of ferromagnetic quantum criticality in the heavy fermion compound ${\mathrm{CeRh}}_{6}{\mathrm{Ge}}_{4}$, we develop a numerical algorithm of infinite projected entangled pair states for the anisotropic ferromagnetic Kondo-Heisenberg model in two dimensions and study the ferromagnetic quantum phase transitions with varying magnetic and hopping anisotropy. Our calculations reveal a continuous ferromagnetic quantum phase transition in the large anisotropic region and first-order quantum phase transitions for smaller anisotropy. Our results highlight the importance of magnetic anisotropy on ferromagnetic quantum criticality in Kondo lattice systems and provide a possible explanation for the experimental observation in ${\mathrm{CeRh}}_{6}{\mathrm{Ge}}_{4}$ with a quasi-one-dimensional magnetic structure. Our work opens the avenue for future studies of the rich Kondo lattice physics using state-of-the-art tensor network approaches.