652 Ch.

11 Mixed Valence and Heavy Fermions

seek the singlet ground state by repeating the Yosida construction at

every lattice site
(11.65)

where Eju is given by an expansion analogous to (11.64)

(11.66)

The variational parameters a(k) are to be determined from optimizing

the expectation value of (11.25) with (11.65). Naturally, we have no
reason to expect that the solution would be the same as for the impurity
problem.
Let us note some general features of I*). It is a singlet with the same
spin structure as the hypothetical “large” c-electron Fermi sea IFS)N+~;
we merely changed the orbital character of L electrons from c to f . It
is also explicit that the expectation value of any of the f-spins is 0.
Though it is a strong correlation problem we did not, as yet, need any
projection operators to ensure that every site is occupied by exactly one
f-electron. All the intricacies of the ground state are associated with
the c-electrons which, among themselves, are non-interacting. That the
problem is nonetheless very difficult, is due to the fact that the same
Bloch operators Ck,, appear in the expansion of all the Zj,,; the Kondo
clouds are strongly non-orthogonal. So to speak, a c-electron near Rj
participates not only in the compensation of the f-spin at that partic-
ular site, but also in the compensation of a very large number of other
f-spins, and therefore its state is subject to a large number of conflict-
ing demands. Formally, the strong overlapping of the Kondo clouds is
signalled by the fact that the E j o operators do not even approximately
anticommute
( 11.67)

It can be shown [361] that (11.65) is identical to a projected hy-

bridized band state
I*> = nn
u k
(1 + 4k)fL,CkU) lFS)N+b , (11.68)