Quantum Impurity Problems in Condensed Matter Physics
Abstract
Impurities are ubiquitous in condensed matter. Boundary Conformal Field Theory (BCFT) provides a powerful method to study a localized quantum impurity interacting with a gapless continuum of excitations. The results can also be implied to nanoscopic devices like quantum dots. In these lecture notes, I review this field, including the following topics: I. General Renormalization Group (RG) framework for quantum impurity problems: example of simplest Kondo model II. Multi-channel Kondo model III. Quantum Dots: experimental realizations of one and two channel Kondo models IV. Impurities in Luttinger liquids: point contact in a quantum wire V. Quantum impurity entanglement entropy VI. Y-junctions of Luttinger liquids VII. Boundary condition changing operators and the X-ray edge problem.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0809.3474,
title = {Quantum Impurity Problems in Condensed Matter Physics},
author = {Ian Affleck},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.3474},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Lecture Notes, Les Houches, 2008, 44 pages. Typos fixed and a new reference