Multichannel Kondo Effect in Superconducting Leads

Abstract

The traditional multichannel Kondo effect takes place when several gapless metallic electronic channels interact with a localized spin-$S$ impurity, with the number of channels $n$ exceeding the size of the impurity spin, $n>2S$, leading to the emergence of non-Fermi liquid impurity behavior at low temperatures. Here, we show that the effect can be realized even when the electronic degrees of freedom are strongly correlated and gapped. The system under consideration consists of a single spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ impurity coupled isotropically to $n$ spin singlet superconducting channels realized by one-dimensional leads with quasi-long-range superconducting order. The competition between the Kondo and superconducting fluctuations induces multiple distinct ground states and boundary phases depending on the relative strengths of the bulk and boundary interactions. Using the Bethe Ansatz technique, we identify four regimes: an overscreened Kondo phase, a zero-mode phase, a Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) phase, and a local-moment phase with an unscreened impurity, each with its own experimental characteristic. We describe the renormalization-group flow, the excitation spectrum, and the full impurity thermodynamics in each phase. Remarkably, even in the presence of a bulk mass gap, the boundary critical behavior in the Kondo phase is governed by the same exponents as in the gapless theory with the low-energy impurity sector flowing to the $SU(2)_n$ Wess-Zumino-Witten (WZW) fixed point, and the impurity entropy monotonically decreasing as a function of temperature. In both the overscreened Kondo and zero-mode phases, the residual impurity entropy is $S_{\mathrm{imp}}(T \to 0) = \ln[2\cos(\pi/(n+2))]$. In the YSR and unscreened phases on the other hand the impurity entropy exhibits non-monotonic temperature dependence and is effectively free at low temperatures with $S_{\mathrm{imp}}(T \to 0) = \ln 2$.