The Kondo effect influence on the conductance of pontual contacts on metallic surfaces.

Author(s)

Antonio Carlos Ferreira Seridonio

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Carlos.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física de São Carlos (IFSC/BT)
• Defense date: 2002-04-05

Examining board members

Luiz Nunes de Oliveira; Eduardo Miranda; Helena Maria Petrilli

• Advisor: Luiz Nunes de Oliveira

Abstract

The scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is a new way to observe experimentally the Kondo effect. When a concentration of atoms id added to a sample (host metal), the tunneling current begins to depend on other non-geometric factors. The rearrangement of charges in the metallic bulk (Friedel oscillations) and the electronic spin scattering (Kondo effect), due to the presence of impurities, change the current value and affect the sample´s topography. These factors must be considered in order to make a correspondence between the generated topography with the true one. As a theoretical description of the system, we use the single impurity Anderson model to simulate the examined sample and a free conduction band to represent the electrons of the microscope metallic tip. Our treatment uses the Kubo formula to calculate the tunneling current, assuming the tunneling Hamiltonian as a perturbation and the electric potential in the linear regime. We initially present a study of the Resonant Level Model, i.e, the Anderson model without correlaction, to show the accuary of the Numerical Renormalization Group procedure. In the next step, we analyse the correlated Anderson model. The dependence of the conductance on tip-impurity distance, at constant temperature, and its dependence on temperature for constant tip-impurity distance, allow a clear physical interpretation after taking into account the Kondo resonance in the spectral density. (AU)