Kondo lattices and the Mott metal-insulator transition

In Kondo lattices with one magnetic impurity at every lattice site, few electrons must quench many spins. This old "exhaustion" issue has been pending for years: it now appears it does not arise: the coherence temperature at which a singlet ground state emerges is the Kondo temperature itself. We survey the evolution of that problem. We then argue that such a lattice Kondo effect governs the Mott transition from a paramagnetic metal to an incoherent spin disordered insulator. It explains the appearance of a narrow resonance in the middle of a large preformed gap. Our naive arguments can be extended to an orbitally degenerate situation: they provide a qualitative understanding of the effect discovered numerically by Capone et al. [Science 296 (2002) 2364], namely the appearance of s-wave superconductivity near the Mott transition when the atomic ground state is a singlet with no residual degeneracy.