arXiv:1809.01631 · Physical Review Letters

Tunneling into a Finite Luttinger Liquid Coupled to Noisy Capacitive Leads

Antonio Štrkalj, Michael S. Ferguson, Tobias Wolf, Ivan P. Levkivskyi, Oded Zilberberg

Published Mar 29, 2019• 7 citations

Abstract

Tunneling spectroscopy of one-dimensional interacting wires can be profoundly sensitive to the boundary conditions of the wire. Here, we analyze the tunneling spectroscopy of a wire coupled to capacitive metallic leads. Strikingly, with increasing many-body interactions in the wire, the impact of the boundary noise becomes more prominent. This interplay allows for a smooth crossover from standard 1D tunneling signatures into a regime where the tunneling is dominated by the fluctuations at the leads. This regime is characterized by an elevated zero-bias tunneling alongside a universal power-law decay at high energies. Furthermore, local tunneling measurements in this regime show a unique spatial dependence that marks the formation of plasmonic standing waves in the wire. Our result offers a tunable method by which to control the boundary effects and measure the interaction strength (Luttinger parameter) within the wire.

DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.122.126802

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