Revival of the Kondo effect

A dilute concentration of magnetic impurities can dramatically affect the transport properties of an otherwise pure metal. This phenomenon, known as the Kondo effect, originates from the interactions of individual magnetic impurities with the conduction electrons. Nearly a decade ago, the Kondo effect was observed in a new system, in which the magnetic moment stems from a single unpaired spin in a lithographically defined quantum dot, or artificial atom. The discovery of the ...

Following the discovery of the Kondo effect the bulk transport and magnetic behavior of the dilute magnetic alloys have been successfully described. In the last fifteen years new directions have been developed as the study of the systems of reduced dimensions and the artificial atoms so called quantum dots. In this review the first subject is reviewed starting with the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) study of a single magnetic impurity. The next subject is the reduction o...

Kondo effect arises whenever a coupling to the Fermi gas induces transitions within the otherwise degenerate ground state multiplet of an interacting system. Both coupling to the Fermi gas and interactions are naturally present in any nanoscale transport experiment. At the same time, many nanostructures can easily be tuned to the vicinity of a degeneracy point. This is why the Kondo effect in its various forms often influences the low temperature transport in meso- and nanosc...

Originally the Kondo effect describes a scattering mechanism of electrons in metals that have defects with internal quantum mechanical degrees of freedom. The characteristic dynamic interplay between localized and itinerant states occurs in many different forms. It is now clear that the Kondo effect shapes the properties of various classes of quantum materials and is a key to understanding their unusual properties. In the following we outline a selection of the most important...

We report Kondo resonances in the conduction of single-molecule transistors based on transition metal coordination complexes. We find Kondo temperatures in excess of 50 K, comparable to those in purely metallic systems. The observed gate dependence of the Kondo temperature is inconsistent with observations in semiconductor quantum dots and a simple single-dot-level model. We discuss possible explanations of this effect, in light of electronic structure calculations.

We demonstrate a tunable Kondo effect realized in small quantum dots. We can switch our dot from a Kondo impurity to a non-Kondo system as the number of electrons on the dot is changed from odd to even. We show that the Kondo temperature can be tuned by means of a gate voltage as a single-particle energy state nears the Fermi energy. Measurements of the temperature and magnetic field dependence of a Coulomb-blockaded dot show good agreement with predictions of both equilibriu...

Molecular electronic devices currently serve as a platform for studying a variety of physical phenomena only accessible at the nanometer scale. One such phenomenon is the highly correlated electronic state responsible for the Kondo effect, manifested here as a "Kondo resonance" in the conductance. Because the Kondo effect results from strong electron-electron interactions, it is not captured by the usual quantum chemistry approaches traditionally applied to understand chemica...

Renormalization group theory of the Kondo effect predicts that an impurity spin is screened by a conduction electron spread over a large distance of order >.1 to 1 micron. This review has the following sections: 1. The Kondo effect and the screening cloud, 2. Non-observation of the Kondo cloud in conventional experiments, 3. Kondo effect in transmission through a quantum dot, 4. Observing the screening cloud in persistent current experiments, 5. Side-coupled quantum dot, 6. C...

We consider transport through a single-molecule magnet strongly coupled to metallic electrodes. We demonstrate that for half-integer spin of the molecule electron- and spin-tunneling \emph{cooperate} to produce both quantum tunneling of the magnetic moment and a Kondo effect in the linear conductance. The Kondo temperature depends sensitively on the ratio of the transverse and easy-axis anisotropies in a non-monotonic way. The magnetic symmetry of the transverse anisotropy im...

The connection of electrical leads to wire-like molecules is a logical step in the development of molecular electronics, but also allows studies of fundamental physics. For example, metallic carbon nanotubes are quantum wires that have been found to act as one-dimensional quantum dots, Luttinger-liquids, proximity-induced superconductors and ballistic and diffusive one-dimensional metals. Here we report that electrically-contacted single-wall nanotubes can serve as powerful p...