654 Ch.

11 Mixed Valence and Heavy Fermions

The first term is the J = 0 energy of the conduction electron Fermi sea
(the “small” Fermi sea), and the second term gives the energy lowering
associated with the singlet formation. This should be compared to the
single impurity result (11.32). The functional form is the same, but
the exponent is now half of the single-impurity value. This appears
most clearly in the weak coupling form of the energy lowering density
(analogous to (11.33))

A& = - (&sing - f5singt.l = U)) = --e JJ . (11.73)

L 2
Thus we have found that the singlet binding energy density of the pe-
riodic Kondo model is in an exponential sense larger than the Kondo
energy for the impurity51.
Let us make a remark about the strong-coupling limit of (11.72)
3J
E s i n g = E s i n g ( J = 0) - N -4 (11.74)

This is easy to interpret: when the band energy becomes negligible, each
electron pairs off with an f-spin. Since N 5 L , the number of on-site
singlets is limited by N .
Returning to the weak coupling limit: in spite of the “lattice co-
herence enhancement”, the energy (1 1.73) is still exponentially smaller
than W (or e ~ ) and, this poses a riddle: how can all the f-spins be
compensated? First, let us understand why this is a question. For the
Kondo impurity, the answer would be clear: the conduction electrons
do the spin compensation. Actually, only a small fraction of the con-
duction electrons. The derivation in Sec. 11.3.1 made it clear that the
disturbance of the Fermi sea is confined to a thin shell of energy width
510ne should not hastily reformulate this into the statement that the “lattice
Kondo temperature” is correspondingly larger than the impurity TK, because this
would conflict with the standard usage of the term. As we mentioned on p. 640, heavy
fermion systems have several characteristic temperatures. Their TKis defined for the
high-T (incoherent) regime, and it may not be very different from the single-ion
TK.The coherence temperature T’ is lower, but it is associated with the excitation
spectrum, not the ground state energy. The stronger singlet binding of the lattice
may not appear as a characteristic temperature, but it has a strong influence on the
position of the magnetic-singlet phase boundary which we will discuss shortly.