Kondo screening and coherence in kagome local-moment metals: Energy scales of heavy fermions in the presence of flat bands

Abstract

The formation of a heavy Fermi liquid in metals with local moments is characterized by multiple energy and temperature scales, most prominently the Kondo temperature and the coherence temperature, characterizing the onset of Kondo screening and the emergence of Fermi-liquid coherence, respectively. In the standard setting of a wide conduction band, both scales depend exponentially on the Kondo coupling. Here we discuss how the presence of flat, i.e., dispersionless, conduction bands modifies this situation. Focussing on the case of the kagome Kondo-lattice model, we utilize a parton mean-field approach to determine the Kondo temperature and the coherence temperature as function of the conduction-band filling $n_c$, both numerically and analytically. For $n_c$ values corresponding to the flat conduction band located at the Fermi level, we show that the exponential is replaced by a linear dependence for the Kondo temperature and a quadratic dependence for the coherence temperature, while a cubic law emerges for the coherence temperature at $n_c$ corresponding to the band edge between the flat and dispersive bands. We discuss implications of our results for pertinent experimental data.