Physical Review Letters 105, 116403 (2010)

SCI

Novel duality in disorder driven local quantum criticality

Minh-Tien Tran and Ki-Seok Kim

We find that competition between random Kondo and random magnetic correlations results in a quantum phase transition from a local Fermi liquid to a spin liquid. The local charge susceptibility turns out to have exactly the same critical exponent as the local spin susceptibility, suggesting a novel duality between the Kondo singlet phase and the critical local moment state beyond the Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson symmetry breaking framework. This leads us to propose an enhanced symmetry at the local quantum critical point, described by an O(4) vector for spin and charge. The symmetry enhancement serves as a mechanism of electron fractionalization in critical impurity dynamics, where such fractionalized excitations are identified with topological excitations.