Kondo effect in alkaline-earth-metal atomic gases with confinement-induced resonances

Alkaline-earth-metal atoms have a long-lived electronic excited state, and when atoms in this excited state are localized in the Fermi sea of ground-state atoms by an external potential, they serve as magnetic impurities, due to the spin-exchange interaction between the excited-and the ground-state atoms. This can give rise to the Kondo effect. However, in order to achieve this effect in current atomic gas experiments, it requires the Kondo temperature to be increased to a sizable portion of the Fermi temperature. In this paper we calculate the confinement-induced resonance (CIR) for the spin-exchanging interaction between the ground and the excited states of the alkaline-earth-metal atoms and propose that the spin-exchange interaction can be strongly enhanced by utilizing the CIR. We analyze this system by the renormalization-group approach and show that near a CIR, the Kondo temperature can be significantly enhanced.