Quantum phase transitions in the Kondo-necklace model

Kondo-necklace model can describe the magnetic low-energy limit of strongly correlated heavy fermion materials. There exists multiple energy scales in this model, each of which indicates a phase. Here, we study quantum phase transitions between these different phases, and show the effect of anisotropies in terms of quantum information properties and the vanishing of energy gap. We employ the perturbative unitary transformations to calculate the energy gap and spin-spin correlations for the model in spatial dimensions d = 1, 2, and 3 as well as for the spin ladders. In particular, we show that the method, although being perturbative, can detect the phase transition point by imposing the spontanous symmetry breaking, in good agreement with numerical and Green’s function methods . We also use concurrence, a bipartite entanglement measure, to probe the criticality of the model. This is based on finding points or regions in which the derivative of concurrence shows non-analyticity. This concurrence is also able to detect critical points in indicative of that the quantum correlations in this model are basically bipartite. Moreover, we discuss the crossover from the 1to 2-dimensional model via the ladder structures.