Disorder-Driven Non-Fermi-Liquid Behavior in Kondo Alloys

Abstract

We show how a model of disordered Anderson lattices can account for many non-Fermi-liquid features observed in some Kondo alloys. Because of the exponential nature of the Kondo temperature scale ${T}_{K}$, even moderate disorder leads to a rather broad distribution of Kondo temperatures, inducing strong effective disorder seen by the conduction electrons. Spins with very low ${T}_{K}$'s remain unquenched and dominate the low-temperature properties. This single underlying mechanism leads to logarithmic divergences in thermodynamic quantities and a linear temperature dependence of the resistivity.