Few-body solutions under spin-exchange interaction: Magnetic bound state and the Kondo screening effect

Abstract

Motivated by recent progresses on ultracold alkaline-earth atoms towards the goal of simulating Kondo physics, in this work we exactly solve the few-body problem of one and two trapped fermions in one dimension interacting with a localized impurity under tunable spin-exchange interaction. It is found that depending on the sign of the spin-exchange coupling, ferromagnetic(FM) or anti-ferromagnetic(AFM), the attractive and repulsive branches can hold different magnetic structures. For the two fermions case, we demonstrate the Kondo screening effect for the attractive branch with AFM coupling, and show that such screening is absent for the ground state with FM coupling. Moreover, we find a sequence of FM upper branches in the AFM coupling side. These FM states are orthogonal to all other attractive branches and their wave functions feature a full spin-charge separation. The effect of an additional contact interaction and the extension of our results to many particles are also discussed. This work reveals the intriguing physics uniquely associated with the spin-exchange interaction in the few-body point of view, which are promisingly to be explored in the experiment of ultracold alkaline-earth atoms.