650 Ch.

11 Mixed Valence and Heavy Fermions

0 The idea that for TK > TRKKY, spin compensation “comes first”
and so prevents ordering, does not really correspond to what we
learned about Kondo screening. The Kondo cloud compensates
the localized spin at its center only when integrated out to a large47
distance [ (11.46). Many other f-spins are well inside the cloud
and see at least a reduced moment at its center, with which they
could interact.

0 At any rate, the magnetic-to-singlet phase transition is predicted

to happen in the unphysical range J = O ( W ) . Both the Kondo
and the RKKY interactions were derived by perturbation theory,
and their use is questionable unless J is sufficiently small compared
to w.
0 The Kondo and RKKY interactions are really not two distinct
terms in a Hamiltonian (as implied in the Kondo necklace model
‘HKNL),but rather two manifestation of the same Kondo interac-
tion in the Kondo lattice Hamiltonian4* (11.25).

0 Keeping the spin degrees of freedom only does not permit to raise
the question about the Fermi volume. However, we are going to
argue that the Kondo and RKKY phases belong to different Fermi
volumes.

The variational treatment of the Kondo lattice model does, in some

measure, deal with these issues. The idea is to construct trial states
which correspond to our expectations about a heavy Fermi liquid, or a
localized f-moment magnet, and draw the phase diagram by comparing
the respective ground state energies. It should be added that though
our introduction of the Hamiltonian (11.25) implied that the physically
470ne may counter that the phase boundary lies at J/W = 0 ( 1 ) , where E N a,
so spin compensation is already intracell. However, this contention brings us to the
next item in the list.
4 8 0 r , going one step back, two manifestations of the c-f hybridization and f-f
Coulomb terms in the PAM (11.4). However, physical reality is more complicated,
and there is also the direct f-c exchange term which can give rise to RKKY mag-
netism, but can not favour overall singlet formation in the same way that the A F
Kondo coupling does. We return to this question in Sec. 11.4.