QCD Kondo effect: Quark matter with heavy-flavor impurities

Abstract

We show that the Kondo effect occurs in light quark matter which contains heavy quarks as impurities. We consider a scattering between a heavy-flavor impurity and a light quark near a Fermi surface which is mediated by gluon-exchange interactions. We find that the scattering amplitude has a logarithmic infrared divergence originating from imperfect cancellation between quark-impurity and hole-impurity scatterings in a loop integral, implying the presence of a strongly coupled regime near the Fermi surface. Renormalization group method is used to find the Kondo scale where a running coupling constant hits a Landau pole. Following an illustration by a simple contact-interaction model, we examine gluon-exchange interactions on the basis of high density QCD.