Effective low-energy description of the two-impurity Anderson model: RKKY interaction and quantum criticality

Abstract

We show that the RKKY interaction in the two-impurity Anderson model comprise two contributions: a ferromagnetic part stemming from the symmetrized hybridization functions and an antiferromagnetic part. We demonstrate that this antiferromagnetic contribution can also be generated by an effective local tunneling term between the two impurities. This tunneling can be analytically calculated for particle-hole symmetric impurities. Replacing the full hybridization functions by the symmetric part and this tunneling term leads to the identical low-temperature fixed point spectrum in the numerical renormalization group. Compensating this tunneling term allows us to restore the Varma-Jones quantum critical point between a strong-coupling phase and a local singlet phase even in the absence of particle-hole symmetry in the hybridization functions. We analytically investigate the spatial frequencies of the effective tunneling term based on the combination of the band dispersion and the shape of the Fermi surface. Numerical renormalization group calculations provide a comparison of the distance-dependent tunneling term and the local spin-spin correlation function. Deviations between the spatial dependency of the full spin-spin correlation function and the textbook RKKY interaction are reported.