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Noisy Kondo impurities

Nature Physics volume 5, pages 208–212 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

In the original discussion of the Kondo effect, the increase of the resistance in an alloy such as Cu0.998Fe0.002 at low temperature was explained by the antiferromagnetic coupling between a magnetic impurity and the spin of the host’s conduction electrons1. This coupling has since emerged as a very generic property of localized electronic states coupled to a continuum2,3,4,5,6,7. Recently, the possibility to design artificial magnetic impurities in nanoscale conductors has opened avenues to the study of this many-body phenomenon in a controlled way and, in particular, in out-of-equilibrium situations8,9,10. So far though, measurements have focused on the average current. Current fluctuations (noise) on the other hand are a sensitive probe that contains detailed information about electronic transport. Here, we report on noise measurements in artificial Kondo impurities realized in carbon-nanotube devices. We find a striking enhancement of the current noise within the Kondo resonance, in contradiction with simple non-interacting theories. Our findings provide a sensitive test bench for one of the most important many-body theories of condensed matter in out-of-equilibrium situations and shed light on the noise properties of highly conductive molecular devices.

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Figure 1: Anomalous temperature dependence of the current noise at the onset of the Kondo effect.
Figure 2: Noise enhancement within the Kondo resonance.
Figure 3: Schematic diagrams of the two limiting cases for noise in an SWNT in the Kondo regime.
Figure 4: Scaling properties of the noise of the Kondo ‘impurities’.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Cottet for a critical reading of the manuscript and K. Le Hur, P. Simon, L. Glazman and N. Regnault for illuminating discussions. This work is supported by the SRC (R11-2000-071) contract, the BK21 contract, the ANR-05-NANO-055 contract, the EU contract FP6-IST-021285-2 and by the C’Nano Ile de France contract SPINMOL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole Normale Supérieure, Laboratoire Pierre Aigrain, 24, rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France

    T. Delattre, C. Feuillet-Palma, L. G. Herrmann, P. Morfin, J.-M. Berroir, G. Fève, B. Plaçais, D. C. Glattli, C. Mora & T. Kontos

  2. CNRS UMR 8551, Laboratoire associé aux universités Pierre et Marie Curie et Denis Diderot, France

    T. Delattre, C. Feuillet-Palma, L. G. Herrmann, P. Morfin, J.-M. Berroir, G. Fève, B. Plaçais, D. C. Glattli, C. Mora & T. Kontos

  3. Service de physique de l’état Condensé, CEA, 91192 Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    D. C. Glattli

  4. Department of Physics, Korea University, Seoul 136-713, Korea

    M.-S. Choi

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  1. T. Delattre
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  2. C. Feuillet-Palma
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Correspondence to T. Kontos.

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Delattre, T., Feuillet-Palma, C., Herrmann, L. et al. Noisy Kondo impurities. Nature Phys 5, 208–212 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1186

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