Matjaž Gomilšek, Martin Klanjšek, Matej Pregelj and Andrej Zorko from the Solid State Physics Department and Rok Žitko from the Department of Theoretical Physics at the “Jožef Stefan” Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Switzerland and China, have published the paper Kondo screening in a charge-insulating spinon metal in Nature Physics. The Kondo effect where conduction electrons screen the local moments of magnetic impurities is well known to occur in ordinary metals. Here, the researchers have shown that an analogous phenomenon is possible also in electric insulators, in particular, in a quantum spin liquid with magnetic spinon excitations forming a Fermi surface. This discovery could be important for manipulating topologically protected spin-liquid states in quantum computing.