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arXiv:cond-mat/0501684 · Physical Review B

Theory of momentum resolved tunneling into a short quantum wire

Gregory A. Fiete, Jiang Qian, Yaroslav Tserkovnyak, Bertrand I. Halperin

Published Jul 8, 2005• 49 citations
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Abstract

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 $N=4$ 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 $N$ 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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.72.045315

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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.
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{\mathcal{R}}^{2}/{L}^{2}R2/L2, where R\mathcal{R}R is a length-scale related to interactions and LLL 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 study tunneling between two nearby cleaved edge quantum wires in a perpendicular magnetic field. Due to Coulomb forces between electrons, the wires form a strongly-interacting pair of Luttinger liquids. We calculate the low-temperature differential tunneling conductance, in which singular features map out the dispersion relations of the fractionalized quasiparticles of the system. The velocities of several such spin-charge separated excitations can be explicitly observed. Moreover, the proposed measurement directly demonstrates the splintering of the tunneling electrons into a multi-particle continuum of these quasiparticles, carrying separately charge from spin. A variety of corrections to the simple Luttinger model are also discussed.
We study the transport of electrons through a long quantum wire connecting two bulk leads. As the electron density in the wire is lowered, the Coulomb interactions lead to short-range crystalline ordering of electrons. In this Wigner crystal state the spins of electrons form an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg spin chain with exponentially small exchange coupling JJJ. Inhomogeneity of the electron density due to the coupling of the wire to the leads results in violation of spin-charge separation in the device. As a result the spins affect the conductance of the wire. At zero temperature the low-energy spin excitations propagate freely through the wire, and its conductance remains 2e2∕h2{e}^{2}∕h2e2∕h. Since the energy of the elementary excitations in the spin chain (spinons) cannot exceed $\ensuremath{\pi}J∕2$, the conductance of the wire acquires an exponentially small negative correction $\ensuremath{\delta}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}G\ensuremath{\propto}\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{exp}(\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\pi}J∕2T)$ at low temperatures T⪡JT⪡JT⪡J. At higher temperatures, T⪢JT⪢JT⪢J, most of the spin excitations in the leads are reflected by the wire, and the conductance levels off at a new universal value e2∕h{e}^{2}∕he2∕h.
The theoretical model of the short-range interacting Luttinger liquid predicts a power-law scaling of the density of states and the momentum distribution function around the Fermi surface, which can be readily tested through tunneling experiments. However, some physical systems have long-range interaction, most notably the Coulomb interaction, leading to significantly different behaviors from the short-range interacting system. In this paper, we revisit the tunneling theory for the one-dimensional electrons interacting via the long-range Coulomb force. We show that even though in a small dynamic range of temperature and bias voltage, the tunneling conductance may appear to have a power-law decay similar to short-range interacting systems, the effective exponent is scale-dependent and slowly increases with decreasing energy. This factor may lead to the sample-to-sample variation in the measured tunneling exponents. We also discuss the crossover to a free Fermi gas at high energy and the effect of the finite size. Our work demonstrates that experimental tunneling measurements in one-dimensional electron systems should be interpreted with great caution when the system is a Coulomb Luttinger liquid.
The low-energy properties of a homogeneous one-dimensional electron system are completely specified by two Tomonaga-Luttinger parameters ${K}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}$ and ${v}_{\ensuremath{\sigma}}.$ In this paper we discuss microscopic estimates of the values of these parameters in semiconductor quantum wires that exploit their relationship to thermodynamic properties. Motivated by the recognized similarity between correlations in the ground state of a one-dimensional electron liquid and correlations in a Wigner crystal, we evaluate these thermodynamic quantities in a self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation. According to our calculations, the Hartree-Fock approximation ground state is a Wigner crystal at all electron densities and has antiferromagnetic order that gradually evolves from spin-density wave to localized in character as the density is lowered. Our results for ${K}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}$ are in good agreement with weak-coupling perturbative estimates ${K}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}^{\mathrm{pert}}$ at high densities, but deviate strongly at low densities, especially when the electron-electron interaction is screened at long distances. ${K}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}^{\mathrm{pert}}\ensuremath{\sim}{n}^{1/2}$ vanishes at small carrier density n, whereas we conjecture that ${K}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1/2$ when $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{n}0,$ implying that ${K}_{\ensuremath{\rho}}$ should pass through a minimum at an intermediate density. Observation of this nonmonotonic dependence could be used to measure the effective interaction range in a realistic semiconductor quantum wire geometry. In the spin sector we find that the spin velocity decreases with increasing interaction strength or decreasing n. Strong correlation effects make it difficult to obtain fully consistent estimates of ${v}_{\ensuremath{\sigma}}$ from Hartree-Fock calculations. We conjecture that ${v}_{\ensuremath{\sigma}}{/v}_{\mathrm{F}}\ensuremath{\propto}{n/V}_{0},$ where V0{V}_{0}V0​ is the interaction strength, in the limit $\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{n}0.$
The exact solution of the one-dimensional Hubbard model (for repulsive and attractive U)U)U) is used to calculate the tunneling rates of single electrons and Cooper pairs between two quantum wires. The critical exponents for the tunneling at small frequencies and low temperatures is obtained by means of the mesoscopic energy spectrum and conformal field theory. The situations of crossing wires, tunneling at a boundary, and resonant tunneling (through a bound state) are considered.