A wave of renewed interest in this phenomenon has been triggered by
the observation of the Kondo effect in a Single-Electron transistor
(SET), a device that can be thought of as an "artificially
constructed" impurity atom ( a potential well with a few trapped
electrons) with macroscopic metallic leads connected to it by tunnel
barriers. SETs allow to directly study the many-body correlated state
formed on a single impurity, with many relevant parameters ( e.g. the
impurity spin and the strength of the exchange coupling) adjustable
in-situ during the experiment.
The experiment that I will describe in this talk takes further
advantage of the great degree of control offered by the SETs for
studying electronic correlations and probes the dynamics of a single
Kondo state. We measure the differential conductance of an SET
irradiated with microwaves in the Kondo regime. To excite the device,
we couple it via a small aperture to a microwave-frequency cavity
resonator, excited on one of its fundamental modes. When the energy of
the microwave photon hf is comparable to the width of the Kondo peak,
satellites to the main zero-bias peak appear at a bias voltage of +-
hf/e. These photon-induced features have been predicted theoretically,
but experiments done to date concluded that they do not exist, and
this finding has even been justified theoretically.
I will describe the conditions for observing the satellites, the
technical challenges that we faced and compare our findings to
theory.