Monday's #paperOfTheDay : "Resistance Minimum in Dilute Magnetic Alloys" by Jun Kondo from 1964. This paper concerns the #electric properties in solid state #physics , more precisely the electrical resistance at low temperatures (around 10K, or -265̀C) in materials that have only a few, and far apart (hence "dilute") impurities. The assumption is made that these impurities are spacially fixed, and have a spin, while the conduction occurs with free moving electrons. Now these electrons scatter with the spins, and, under the given assumptions, this scattering process can occur in a number of ways. For concrete calculations, Kondo uses a Hamiltonian that had been known before, and computes the individual probabilities to second order perturbatively. Taking them all together, the terms combine nicely and produce an effective resistance that depends logarithmically on the temperature. If the constant prefactor has the correct sign, this implies that the resistance -- which normally decreases as the temperature is lowered -- obtains a minimum, and then shows a sharp increase at even lower temperatures. This is nowadays known as the Kondo effect. https://academic.oup.com/ptp/article/32/1/37/1834632



