Probing Collective and Individual Kondo Screening: Multi-Stage, Multi-Channel Kondo Effects in a $C_3$-Symmetric Four-Impurity Model

Abstract

Collective screening has been proposed to underlie the basic physics of multi-impurity and lattice Kondo systems. But how to establish this picture and distinguish it from individual (local) Kondo screening remains a grand challenge. The recently developed auxiliary-bath numerical renormalization group (AUNRG) method provides a key step towards resolving this issue. Its application to the $C_3$-symmetric three-impurity Kondo (3IK) model with a shared electron bath reveals fully screened Fermi liquid ground states arising from collective screening of cluster spin degrees of freedom at small Kondo coupling $J_{\rm K}$ and individual (local) screening of local impurities at large $J_{\rm K}$. Here we design a four-impurity Kondo (4IK) model where the probe impurity couples only to the original three Kondo impurities to detect the nature of the screened states. We show that the collective and individual Kondo screenings give rise to emergent multi-stage, two-channel Kondo effect and unstable three-channel Kondo effect, respectively. This suggests a special helicity structure of the screened states and confirms the idea of collective screening in multi-impurity Kondo systems. Our work also demonstrates that the same auxiliary-bath construction can be readily extended to models with additional impurities to explore novel many-body quantum states with emergent cluster degrees of freedom.