Kondo impurities at the edges of a quantum wire*

Quantum impurity systems, where a localized impurity is coupled to a large bath of particles appear naturally in many fields from mesoscopic physics and quantum dot systems to the Kondo lattice of Heavy fermion materials.
In this talk we study a miniature Kondo lattice consisting of a one dimensional quantum wire coupled to Kondo impurities at either end. We show that it is exactly solvable by means of Bethe Ansatz for arbitrary values of bulk spin exchange interaction and of the Kondo coupling. The model exhibits both gapped and gapless phases depending on the sign of the bulk interaction and a competition between dynamical mass generation and the Kondo effect. We construct the ground state in all regimes and study the excitations and their finite size corrections as well as the impurity magnetization as function of an applied field.