Probing the Excitations of the Luttinger Liquids

Silvio Rabello, Qimiao Si A

Danyel Cavazos-Cavazos, Ruwan Senaratne, Aashish Kafle +1 more

Abstract The Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid (TLL) theory describes the low-energy excitations of strongly correlated one-dimensional (1D) fermions. In the past years, a number of studies have provided a detailed understanding of this universality class. More recently, theoretical investigations that go beyond the standard low-temperature, linear-response TLL regime have been developed. While these provide a basis for understanding the dynamics of the spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid, there are few experimental investigations in this regime. Here we report the observation of a thermally induced, spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid in a 6Li atomic Fermi gas confined to 1D. We use Bragg spectroscopy to measure the suppression of spin-charge separation and the decay of correlations as the temperature is increased. Our results probe the crossover between the coherent and incoherent regimes of the Luttinger liquid and elucidate the roles of the charge and the spin degrees of freedom in this regime.

Thierry Giamarchi, Thomas Nattermann, Pierre Le Doussal

K.-V. Pham

We argue that a simple way to bypass reflections at the boundaries of a finite Luttinger liquid (LL) connected to electrodes is to match load and drain impedances to the characteristic impedance of the LL viewed as a mesoscopic transmission line. For an impedance matched LL, this implies that the AC and DC shot noise properties of a finite LL are identical to those of an infinite LL. Even for an impedance mismatched LL, we show by a careful analysis of reflections that the intrinsic infinite LL properties can still be extracted yielding possibly irrational charges for the LL elementary excitations. We improve on existing results for AC shot noise by deriving expressions with explicit dependence on the charges of the fractional states. Most notably these results can be established quite straightforwardly without resort to the Keldysh technique. We apply these arguments to two experimental setups which allow the observation of different sets of fractional quasiparticles: (i) injection of current by a STM tip in the bulk of a LL; (ii) backscattering of current by an impurity. An Appendix reviews pedagogically the 'fractional states picture' of the LL.

Thierry Giamarchi, Thomas Nattermann, Pierre Le Doussal