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arXiv:0904.4019 · Physical Review B

Screening of a Luttinger liquid wire by a scanning tunneling microscope tip. I. Spectral properties

M. Guigou, Thierry Martin, Adeline Crépieux C

Published Jul 22, 2009• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The screening effect due to a scanning tunneling microscope tip which is placed in the vicinity of an interacting quantum wire is considered. With the help of a bosonization procedure, we are able to determine nonperturbatively the Green's functions of the quantum wire in the presence of both electrostatic screening by the tip and Coulomb interactions in the wire. In our approach we justify that the working Hamiltonian of the whole system is quadratic when ${K}_{c}>1/2$ and can be solved by integration over the degrees of freedom of the tip. Once the Green's functions are known, we calculate the spectral properties. We show that the spectral function, as well as the tunneling density of states, is affected by the screening and that the local density of states strongly deviates from its unscreened value when the tip gets close to the wire. Moreover, we observe that the spatial extension of the deviation of the local density of states is related to both the Coulomb interactions parameter and the screening strength.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.80.045420

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The screening effect due to a scanning tunneling microscope tip which is placed in the vicinity of an interacting quantum wire is considered. With the help of a bosonization procedure, we are able to determine nonperturbatively the Green's functions of the quantum wire in the presence of both electrostatic screening by the tip and Coulomb interactions in the wire. In our approach we justify that the working Hamiltonian of the whole system is quadratic when Kc>1/2{K}_{c}>1/2Kc​>1/2 and can be solved by integration over the degrees of freedom of the tip. Once the Green's functions are known, we calculate the spectral properties. We show that the spectral function, as well as the tunneling density of states, is affected by the screening and that the local density of states strongly deviates from its unscreened value when the tip gets close to the wire. Moreover, we observe that the spatial extension of the deviation of the local density of states is related to both the Coulomb interactions parameter and the screening strength.
We study the effect of an electrostatic coupling between a scanning tunneling microscope tip and a Luttinger liquid wire on the tunneling current and noise between the two. Solving the Dyson equations nonperturbatively for a local interaction potential, we derive the Green's functions associated to the wire and to the tip. Interestingly, the electrostatic coupling leads to the existence of new correlators, which we call mixed Green's functions, which are correlators between the bosonic fields of the wire and the tip. Next, we calculate the transport properties up to second order with the amplitude of the tunnel transfer; the profile of the tunneling current is strongly modified by the presence of screening. The zero-frequency noise is modified in a similar way but the Fano factor remains unchanged. We also consider the effect of the screening on the asymmetry of the finite-frequency nonsymmetrized noise and on the conductance.
We investigate how the conductance GGG through a clean interacting quantum wire is affected by the presence of contacts and noninteracting leads. The contacts are defined by a vanishing two-particle interaction to the left and a finite repulsive interaction to the right or vice versa. No additional single-particle scattering terms (impurities) are added. We first use Bosonization and the local Luttinger liquid picture and show that within this approach GGG is determined by the properties of the leads regardless of the details of the spatial variation of the Luttinger liquid parameters. This generalizes earlier results obtained for steplike variations. In particular, no single-particle backscattering is generated at the contacts. We then study a microscopic model applying the functional renormalization group and show that the spatial variation of the interaction produces single-particle backscattering, which in turn leads to a reduced conductance. We investigate how the smoothness of the contacts affects GGG and show that for decreasing energy scale its deviation from the unitary limit follows a power law with the same exponent as obtained for a system with a weak single-particle impurity placed in the contact region of the interacting wire and the leads.
We calculate the density of states for an interacting quantum wire in the presence of two impurities of arbitrary potential strength. To perform this calculation, we describe the Coulomb interactions in the wire within the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory. After establishing and solving the Dyson equation for the fermionic retarded Green's functions, we study how the profile of the local density of states is affected by the interactions in the entire range of impurity potentials. Same as in the noninteracting case, when increasing the impurity strength, the central part of the wire becomes more and more disconnected from the semi-infinite leads, and discrete localized states begin to form; the width and the periodicity of the corresponding peaks in the spectrum depends on the interaction strength. As expected from the Luttinger liquid theory, impurities also induce a reduction of the local density of states at small energies. Two other important aspects are highlighted: the appearance of an extra modulation in the density of states at nonzero Fermi momentum when interactions are present, and the fact that forward scattering must be taken into account in order to recover the Coulomb-blockade regime for strong impurities.
Motivated by recent scanning tunneling and photoemission spectroscopy measurements on self-organized gold chains on a germanium surface, we reinvestigate the local single-particle spectral properties of Luttinger liquids. In the first part we use the bosonization approach to exactly compute the local spectral function of a simplified field theoretical low-energy model and take a closer look at scaling properties as a function of the ratio of energy and temperature. Translational-invariant Luttinger liquids as well as those with an open boundary (cut chain geometry) are considered. We explicitly show that the scaling functions of both set-ups have the same analytical form. The scaling behavior suggests a variety of consistency checks which can be performed on measured data to experimentally verify Luttinger liquid behavior. In the second part we approximately compute the local spectral function of a microscopic lattice model-the extended Hubbard model-close to an open boundary using the functional renormalization group. We show that it follows the field theoretical prediction in the low-energy regime as a function of energy and temperature, and point out the importance of nonuniversal energy scales inherent to any microscopic model. The spatial dependence of this spectral function is characterized by oscillatory behavior and an envelope function which follows a power law in accordance with the field theoretical continuum model. Interestingly, for the lattice model we find a phase shift which is proportional to the two-particle interaction and not accounted for in the standard bosonization approach to Luttinger liquids with an open boundary. We briefly comment on the effects of several one-dimensional branches cutting the Fermi energy and Rashba spin-orbit interaction.
Motivated by recent tunneling experiments in the parallel wire geometry, we calculate results for momentum resolved tunneling into a short one-dimensional wire, containing a small number of electrons. We derive some general theorems about the momentum dependence, and we carry out exact calculations for up to N=4N=4N=4 electrons in the final state, for a system with screened Coulomb interactions that models the situation of the experiments. We also investigate the limit of large NNN using a Luttinger-liquid type analysis. We consider the low-density regime, where the system is close to the Wigner crystal limit, and where the energy scale for spin excitations can be much lower than for charge excitations, and we consider temperatures intermediate between the relevant spin energies and charge excitations, as well as temperatures below both energy scales.
We revise a phase diagram for the sliding Luttinger liquid (SLL) of coupled one-dimensional quantum wires packed in two- or three-dimensional arrays in the absence of a magnetic field. We analyse whether physically justifiable (reasonable) inter-wire interactions, i.e. either the screened Coulomb or "Coulomb-blockade" type interactions, stabilise the SLL phase. Calculating the scaling dimensions of the most relevant perturbations (the inter-wire single-particle hybridisation, charge-density wave, and superconducting inter-wire couplings), we find that their combination always destroys the SLL phase for the repulsive intra-wire interaction. However, suppressing the inter-wire tunnelling of repulsive fermions (when the charge-density wave is the only remaining perturbation), one can observe a stability region emerging due to the inter-wire forward scattering interaction.