  Dilute alloys of rare earths have played a vital role in understanding
magnetic phenomena. Here, we model the ground state of dilute 4f rare-earth
impurities in light metals. When the 4f subshells are open (but not
half-filled), the spin-orbit coupling imprints a rotational charge current of
conduction electrons around rare-earth atoms. The sign and amplitude of the
current oscillate similar to the RKKY spin polarization. We compute the
observable effect, namely the Oersted field generated by the current vortices
and the Knight shift.
