Speaker: Dirk Morr, University of Illinois-Chicago
Abstract: Recent experimental advances have made it possible to study the Kondo effect in nanoscale structures. These achievements have opened unprecedented opportunities not only for manipulating the Kondo effect at the atomic level, but also for studying how Kondo screening and coherence evolve on different length scales from a single Kondo impurity to the Kondo lattice. In this talk, I show how this evolution can be studied in Kondo droplets, consisting of tens to hundreds of magnetic atoms arranged in a well defined geometry. In such Kondo nanostructures, it is possible to manipulate the competition between Kondo screening and magnetic coupling via changes in the droplet's geometry and size. Moreover, I will show how defects in Kondo lattice systems (i.e., heavy fermion materials) can unveil their complex electronic and magnetic correlations in real space. The strongly correlated nature of these materials lead to highly non-linear feedback effects between defects that can drive the system to a novel, inhomogeneous ground state via a first order phase transition.