Proposal to directly observe the Kondo effect through enhanced photo-induced scattering of cold fermionic and bosonic atoms

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental method to observe the Kondo effect directly in ultracold atomic gases by using spin-dependent scattering and optical Feshbach resonances, revealing characteristic temperature dependence.

Contribution

It introduces a novel protocol to detect the Kondo effect in cold atoms through enhanced photo-induced scattering, enabling new explorations of correlated quantum phenomena.

Findings

Logarithmic temperature dependence of momentum transfer observed

Kondo effect signature analogous to magnetic impurity resistivity

Potential to study Kondo lattice and heavy-fermion systems in cold atoms

Abstract

We propose an experimental protocol to directly observe the Kondo effect by scattering ultracold atoms with spin-dependent interactions. We propose using an optical Feshbach resonance to engineer Kondo-type spin-dependent interactions in a system with ultracold $^6$Li and $^{87}$Rb gases. We calculate the momentum transferred from the $^{87}$Rb gas to the $^6$Li gas in a scattering experiment and show that it has a logarithmically enhanced temperature dependence, characteristic of the Kondo effect and analogous to the resistivity of alloys with magnetic impurities. Experimentally detecting this enhancement will give a different perspective on the Kondo effect, and allow us to explore a rich variety of problems such as the Kondo lattice problem and heavy-fermion systems.