Magnetic impurity in a U(1) spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface

Magnetic impurity in a U(1) spin liquid with a spinon Fermi surface. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We address the problem of a magnetic impurity in a two-dimensional U (1) spin liquid where the spinons have gapless excitations near the Fermi surface and are coupled to an emergent gapless gauge field. Using a large N expansion, we analyze the strong coupling behavior and obtain the Kondo temperature which was found to be the same as for a Fermi liquid. In this approximation, we also study the specific heat and the magnetic susceptibility of the impurity. These quantities present no deviations from the Fermi liquid ones, consistent with the notion that the magnetic impurity is only sensitive to the local density of fermionic states.