NRG study of the Kondo effect in the presence of itinerant-electron ferromagnetism

J. Martinek, M. Sindel, L. Borda, J. Barnaś, J. König, G. Schön, J. von Delft

Published 2003-04-16, updated 2004-01-29Version 2

The Kondo effect in quantum dots (QDs) - artificial magnetic impurities - attached to ferromagnetic leads is studied with the numerical renormalization group (NRG) method. It is shown that the QD level is spin-split due to presence of ferromagnetic electrodes, leading to a suppression of the Kondo effect. We find that the Kondo effect can be restored by compensating this splitting with a magnetic field. Although the resulting Kondo resonance then has an unusual spin asymmetry with a reduced Kondo temperature, the ground state is still a locally-screened state, describable by Fermi liquid theory and a generalized Friedel sum rule, and transport in the unitary limit is not spin dependent.