  The Kondo effect is a key many-body phenomenon in condensed matter physics.
It concerns the interaction between a localised spin and free electrons.
Discovered in metals containing small amounts of magnetic impurities, it is now
a fundamental mechanism in a wide class of correlated electron systems. Control
over single, localised spins has become relevant also in fabricated structures
due to the rapid developments in nano-electronics. Experiments have already
demonstrated artificial realisations of isolated magnetic impurities at
metallic surfaces, nanometer-scale magnets, controlled transitions between
two-electron singlet and triplet states, and a tunable Kondo effect in
semiconductor quantum dots. Here, we report an unexpected Kondo effect realised
in a few-electron quantum dot containing singlet and triplet spin states whose
energy difference can be tuned with a magnetic field. This effect occurs for an
even number of electrons at the degeneracy between singlet and triplet states.
The characteristic energy scale is found to be much larger than for the
ordinary spin-1/2 case.
