Brief
Caltech‑Yale team predicts Kondo effect in real materials
A new calculation technique lets scientists forecast the Kondo effect from a material’s true atomic structure, according to ScienceDaily.
By Felo News Desk · Published
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology and Yale University have announced a computational approach that can predict the Kondo effect in specific real materials, a capability that was previously unavailable, ScienceDaily reported on 10 October 2026.
The method works directly from a material’s actual atomic and electronic structure rather than relying on simplified models that only approximate the phenomenon. By feeding the true crystal‑level details into advanced many‑body calculations, the researchers were able to reproduce the characteristic resistance minimum that defines the Kondo effect when a magnetic impurity such as iron or manganese is embedded in a metal host like copper.
Lead authors Linqing Peng (PhD ’25) and Tianyu Zhu, both of Yale, carried out the work in the laboratory of Garnet Chan, Bren Professor of Chemistry at Caltech and director of the Rudolph A. Marcus Center for Theoretical Chemistry. Chan, who is also a Simons Investigator in Physics and the senior author of the paper, said, “It is now possible to predict the properties of some complicated materials purely through computation without referring to experiment.” The findings were published in the journal Science.
According to the report, the Kondo effect has long served as a benchmark for strongly correlated electron systems, where interactions between electrons cannot be ignored. In conventional metals, cooling lowers electrical resistance, but in a metal containing a magnetic impurity the resistance stops falling at the Kondo temperature, reaches a minimum, and then rises as temperature continues to drop. The new computational framework reproduces this behavior from first principles.
Chan described the studied materials as “a baby step, or a prototype problem, along the way to more complex phenomena such as high‑temperature superconductors and quantum magnets.” He added that the ability to predict the Kondo effect could pave the way for realistic computer simulations of more intricate quantum materials, potentially accelerating the design of next‑generation quantum technologies.
Key facts
- Caltech and Yale researchers developed a first‑principles method to predict the Kondo effect. (sciencedaily.com)
- The approach uses the true atomic and electronic structure of a material rather than simplified models. (sciencedaily.com)
- Lead authors are Linqing Peng and Tianyu Zhu; senior author is Garnet Chan. (sciencedaily.com)
- The work was published in Science on 10 October 2026. (sciencedaily.com)
- Chan said the method could eventually aid simulations of high‑temperature superconductors and quantum magnets. (sciencedaily.com)
Sources
- [1] sciencedaily.com — originally reported as “A famous quantum effect can finally be predicted in real materials”
