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arXiv:cond-mat/0608001 · Physical Review B

Local spectral weight of a Luttinger liquid: Effects from edges and impurities

Paata Kakashvili, Henrik Johannesson, Sebastian Eggert

Published Aug 21, 2006• 24 citations
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Abstract

We calculate the finite-temperature local spectral weight (LSW) of a Luttinger liquid with an ``open'' (hard-wall) boundary. Close to the boundary the LSW exhibits characteristic oscillations indicative of spin-charge separation. The line shape of the LSW is also found to have a Fano-like asymmetry, a feature originating from the interplay between electron-electron interaction and scattering off the boundary. Our results can be used to predict how edges and impurities influence scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of one-dimensional electron systems at low temperatures and voltage bias. Applications to STM on single-walled carbon nanotubes are discussed.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.74.085114

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arXiv:1111.7174•Journal of Physics Condensed Matter•Dec 5, 2012•9 citations
We calculate the finite-temperature local spectral weight (LSW) of a Luttinger liquid with an ``open'' (hard-wall) boundary. Close to the boundary the LSW exhibits characteristic oscillations indicative of spin-charge separation. The line shape of the LSW is also found to have a Fano-like asymmetry, a feature originating from the interplay between electron-electron interaction and scattering off the boundary. Our results can be used to predict how edges and impurities influence scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of one-dimensional electron systems at low temperatures and voltage bias. Applications to STM on single-walled carbon nanotubes are discussed.
We use bosonization methods to calculate the exact finite-temperature single-electron Green's function of a spinful Luttinger liquid confined by open boundaries. The corresponding local spectral density is constructed and analyzed in detail. The interplay between boundary, finite-size, and thermal effects are shown to dramatically influence the low-energy properties of the system. In particular, the well-known zero-temperature critical behavior in the bulk always crosses over to a boundary dominated regime in the vicinity of the Fermi level. Thermal fluctuations cause an enhanced depletion of spectral weight for small energies $\ensuremath{\omega}$, with the spectral density scaling as ${\ensuremath{\omega}}^{2}$ for $\ensuremath{\omega}$ much less than the temperature. Consequences for photoemission experiments are discussed.
Explicit predictions for scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) on interacting one-dimensional electron systems are made using the Luttinger liquid formalism. The STM current changes with the distance from an impurity or boundary in a characteristic way, which reveals the spin-charge separation and the interaction strength in the system. The current exhibits Friedel-like oscillations, but also carries additional modulated behavior as a function of voltage and distance, which shows the spin-charge separation in real space. Moreover, very close to the boundary the current is strongly reduced, which is an indication of the interaction strength in the system.
In this Ph.D. thesis I present the background and providefurther details to the work presented in the appended papers. The background consists of brief overviews of Kondo physics, Luttinger liquid theory, and conformal field theory. My own research is divided into three parts: the first deals with the interplay between Luttinger and Kondo physics (described in Papers I and II), the secondaddresses scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) response of a Luttinger liquid with an edge or an impurity (described in Paper III), and the third explores the boundary Green's function of 1D electrons in the spin-incoherent regime (described in Paper IV). In Papers I and II a setup is proposed which allows for acontrolled study of Kondo and Luttinger liquid physics. Itconsists of a quantum box, biased by a gate voltage, and side-coupled to a quantum wire by a point contact. Close to the degeneracy points of the Coulomb blockaded box the setup can be described as a Luttinger liquid interacting with an effective Kondo impurity. Using boundary conformal field theory techniques we predict that for the case of spin-polarized electrons the differential capacitance of the box will exhibit distinctive Luttinger liquid scaling with temperature and gate voltage. In the limit of zero magnetic field the Luttinger liquid behavior gets masked by two-channel Kondo screening, leading to a logarithmic scaling of the differential capacitance with temperatureand gate voltage. These effects should be possible to studyexperimentally, using the recently developed single-electrontransistor (SET) electrometer technique.In Paper III the finite-temperature local spectral weight (LSW) of a Luttinger liquid with a hard wall boundary is calculated. Close to the boundary the LSW exhibits characteristic oscillations indicative of spin-charge separation. The line shape of the LSW is also found to have a Fano-like asymmetry, a feature originating from the combined effect of electron-electron interaction and scattering off the boundary. Our results can be used to predict how edges and impurities influencethe STM response of one-dimensional electron systemsat low temperatures and voltage bias. Applications to STM onsingle-walled carbon nanotubes are also discussed.Paper IV, finally, presents a study of the spin-incoherent regime of 1D strongly interacting electrons. For sufficiently low densities the potential energy dominates the kinetic energy, and one can easily reach thespin-incoherent regime where the spin exchange energy is much less than the temperature. We have generalized the description of the spin-incoherent regime to account for the presence of a boundary. By calculating the exact Green's function we find that the charge sector critical exponent is highly sensitive to the boundary, strongly modifying the tunneling of electrons close to it. Our approach also allows for a detailed description of the crossover between boundary and bulk regimes.
We study a Luttinger Liquid in a finite one-dimensional wire with box-like boundary conditions by considering the local distribution of the single-particle spectral weight. This corresponds to the experimental probability of extracting a single electron at a given place and energy, which can be interpreted as the square of an electron wave function. For the noninteracting case, this is given by a standing wave at the Fermi wave vector. In the presence of interactions, however, the wave functions obtain additional structure with a sharp depletion near the edges and modulations throughout the wire. In the spinful case, these modulations correspond to the separate spin- and charge-like excitations in the system.
We examine the local density of states (DOS) at low energies numerically and analytically for the Hubbard model in one dimension. The eigenstates represent separate spin and charge excitations with a remarkably rich structure of the local DOS in space and energy. The results predict signatures of strongly correlated excitations in the tunneling probability along finite quantum wires, such as carbon nanotubes, atomic chains or semiconductor wires in scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) experiments. However, the detailed signatures can only be partly explained by standard Luttinger liquid theory. In particular, we find that the effective boundary exponent can be negative in finite wires, which leads to an increase of the local DOS near the edges in contrast to the established behavior in the thermodynamic limit.
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.