The natural excitations of an interacting one-dimensional system at low energy are the hydrodynamic modes of a Luttinger liquid, protected by the Lorentz invariance of the linear dispersion. We show that beyond low energies, where the quadratic dispersion reduces the symmetry to Galilean, the main character of the many-body excitations changes into a hierarchy: calculations of dynamic correlation functions for fermions (without spin) show that the spectral weights of the excitations are proportional to powers of
R2/L2, where
R is a length-scale related to interactions and
L is the system length. Thus only small numbers of excitations carry the principal spectral power in representative regions on the energy-momentum planes. We have analyzed the spectral function in detail and have shown that the first-level (strongest) excitations form a mode with parabolic dispersion, like that of a renormalized single particle. The second-level excitations produce a singular power-law line shape to the first-level mode and multiple power laws at the spectral edge. We have illustrated a crossover to a Luttinger liquid at low energy by calculating the local density of states through all energy scales: from linear to nonlinear, and to above the chemical potential energies. In order to test this model, we have carried out experiments to measure the momentum-resolved tunneling of electrons (fermions with spin) from/to a wire formed within a GaAs heterostructure. We observe a well-resolved spin-charge separation at low energy with appreciable interaction strength and only a parabolic dispersion of the first-level mode at higher energies. We find a structure resembling the second-level excitations, which dies away rapidly at high momentum in line with the theoretical predictions here.
We reinvestigate the momentum-resolved single-particle spectral function of the Tomonaga-Luttinger model. In particular, we focus on the role of the momentum dependence of the two-particle interaction
V(q). Usually,
V(q) is assumed to be a constant and integrals are regularized in the ultraviolet ``by hand'' employing an ad hoc procedure. As the momentum dependence of the interaction is irrelevant in the renormalization group sense, this does not affect the universal low-energy properties of the model, e.g., exponents of power laws, if all energy scales are sent to zero. If, however, the momentum
k is fixed away from the Fermi momentum
kF, with $|k\ensuremath{-}{k}_{\mathrm{F}}|$ setting a nonvanishing energy scale, the details of
V(q) start to matter. We provide strong evidence that any curvature of the two-particle interaction at small transferred momentum
q destroys power-law scaling of the momentum-resolved spectral function as a function of energy. Even for $|k\ensuremath{-}{k}_{\mathrm{F}}|$ much smaller than the momentum-space range of the interaction the spectral line shape depends on the details of
V(q). The significance of our results for universality in the Luttinger liquid sense, for experiments on quasi-one-dimensional metals, and for recent results on the spectral function of one-dimensional correlated systems taking effects of the curvature of the single-particle dispersion into account (``nonlinear LL phenomenology'') is discussed.
For many years, the Luttinger liquid theory has served as a useful paradigm for the description of one-dimensional (1D) quantum fluids in the limit of low energies. This theory is based on a linearization of the dispersion relation of the particles constituting the fluid. Recent progress in understanding 1D quantum fluids beyond the low-energy limit is reviewed, where the nonlinearity of the dispersion relation becomes essential. The novel methods which have been developed to tackle such systems combine phenomenology built on the ideas of the Fermi-edge singularity and the Fermi-liquid theory, perturbation theory in the interaction strength, and new ways of treating finite-size properties of integrable models. These methods can be applied to a wide variety of 1D fluids, from 1D spin liquids to electrons in quantum wires to cold atoms confined by 1D traps. Existing results for various dynamic correlation functions are reviewed, in particular, the dynamic structure factor and the spectral function. Moreover, it is shown how a dispersion nonlinearity leads to finite particle lifetimes and its impact on the transport properties of 1D systems at finite temperatures is discussed. The conventional Luttinger liquid theory is a special limit of the new theory, and the relation between the two is explained.
We study electronic transport through a one-dimensional, finite-length quantum wire of correlated electrons (Luttinger liquid) coupled at arbitrary position via tunnel barriers to two semi-infinite, one-dimensional as well as stripe-like (two-dimensional) leads, thereby bringing theory closer towards systems resembling set-ups realized in experiments. In particular, we compute the temperature dependence of the linear conductance G of a system without bulk impurities on the temperature T. The appearance of new temperature scales introduced by the lengths of overhanging parts of the leads and the wire implies a G(T) which is much more complex than the power-law behavior described so far for end-coupled wires. Depending on the precise set-up the wide temperature regime of power-law scaling found in the end-coupled case is broken up into up to five fairly narrow regimes interrupted by extended crossover regions. Our results can be used to optimize the experimental set-ups designed for a verification of Luttinger liquid power-law scaling.
Luttinger liquids occupy a notable place in physics as one of the most understood classes of quantum many-body systems. The experimental mission of measuring its main prediction, power laws in observable quantities, has already produced a body of exponents in different semiconductor and metallic structures. Here, we combine tunneling spectroscopy with density-dependent transport measurements in the same quantum wires over more than two orders of magnitude in temperature to very low electron temperatures down to ∼40 mK. This reveals that, when the second 1D subband becomes populated, the temperature dependence splits into two ranges with different exponents in the power-law dependence of the conductance, both dominated by the finite-size effect of the end-tunneling process. This result demonstrates the importance of measuring the Luttinger parameters as well as the number of modes independently through spectroscopy in addition to the transport exponent in the characterization of Luttinger liquids. This opens a pathway to unambiguous interpretation of the exponents observed in quantum wires.
The nonlinear Luttinger liquid phenomenology of one-dimensional correlated Fermi systems is an attempt to describe the effect of the band curvature beyond the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid paradigm. It relies on the observation that the dynamical structure factor of the interacting electron gas shows a logarithmic threshold singularity when evaluated to first order perturbation theory in the two-particle interaction. This term was interpreted as the linear one in an expansion which was conjectured to resum to a power law. A field theory, the mobile impurity model, which is constructed such that it provides the power law in the structure factor, was suggested to be the proper effective model and used to compute the single-particle spectral function. This forms the basis of the nonlinear Luttinger liquid phenomenology. Surprisingly, the second order perturbative contribution to the structure factor was so far not studied. We first close this gap and show that it is consistent with the conjectured power law. Secondly, we critically assess the steps leading to the mobile impurity Hamiltonian. We show that the model does not allow to include the effect of the momentum dependence of the (bulk) two-particle potential. This dependence was recently shown to spoil power laws in the single-particle spectral function which previously were believed to be part of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid universality. Although our second order results for the structure factor are consistent with power-law scaling, this raises doubts that the conjectured nonlinear Luttinger liquid phenomenology can be considered as universal. We conclude that more work is required to clarify this.