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arXiv:cond-mat/9909001 · Physical Review Letters

Scanning Tunneling Microscopy of a Luttinger Liquid

Sebastian Eggert

Published May 8, 2000• 63 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.84.4413

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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.
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.
Theoretical studies suggest that an interacting one-dimensional electron system does not behave as a Fermi liquid. Instead, it is predicted to form a Luttinger liquid characterized e.g. by the absence of fermionic quasiparticles and interaction-dependent power-laws for transport quantities. So far, however, only a limited number of experiments have provided evidence for Luttinger liquid behavior. In this thesis we consider alternative methods to detect electronic correlations in one-dimensional electron systems based on our calculations of persistent currents and quantization of charge in ballistic single channel rings. The persistent current in an isolated impurity-free Luttinger liquid ring is found to be the same as for a system of non-interacting electrons. In contrast, a Luttinger liquid behavior is revealed if the ring is weakly connected to an electron reservoir and capacitively coupled to a gate electrode. The persistent current and the average charge in the ring are shown to change in a stepwise manner with the gate voltage at low temperatures. Both the step positions and the crossover temperatures are determined by the Luttinger liquid correlation parameter .alpha.(.alpha.c) which therefore can be measured. When a potential barrier is incorporated into the ring, the presence of strong interactions between electrons leads to a suppression of the persistent current and a change in its temperature dependence. A sharp maximum of the current is predicted to occur as a function of temperature. When two barriers are introduced into the ring, the possibility of resonant tunneling for the persistent current opens up. Two kinds of resonant behavior are discovered in the closed geometry: a current independent of the barrier transparency and a current analogous to the one with a single potential barrier. The persistent current in a ring containing a gas of fractionally charged excitations obeying fractional exclusion statistics is also studied. At finite temperatures, anomalous oscillations of the current are predicted as a manifestation of the statistics of the quasiparticles.
We study Friedel oscillations in one-dimensional electron liquids for arbitrary electron-electron interaction and arbitrary impurity strength. Explicit results for spinless as well as spin- 12\frac{1}{2}21​ electrons are given. In the case of Luttinger-liquid leads, the Friedel oscillations decay as ${x}^{\ensuremath{-}g}$ far away from the impurity where ggg is the interaction constant. For a weak scatterer, a slower decay is found at small-to-intermediate distances from the impurity, with a crossover to the asymptotic ${x}^{\ensuremath{-}g}$ decay.
The temperature-induced emergence of Wigner correlations over finite-size effects in a strongly interacting one-dimensional quantum dot is studied in the framework of the spin coherent Luttinger liquid. We demonstrate that, for temperatures comparable with the zero mode spin excitations, Friedel oscillations are suppressed by the thermal fluctuations of higher spin modes. On the other hand, the Wigner oscillations, sensitive to the charge mode only, are stable and become more visible. This behavior has been proved to be robust both in the thermal electron density and in the linear conductance in the presence of a scanning tunnel microscope tip. The latter probe is not directly proportional to the electron density and may confirm the above phenomena with complementary and additional information.
We consider momentum resolved tunneling between a Luttinger liquid and a two dimensional electron gas as a function of transverse magnetic field. We include the effects of an anomalous exponent and Zeeman splitting on both the Luttinger liquid and the two dimensional electron gas. We show that there are six dispersing features that should be observed in magneto-tunneling, in contrast with the four features that would be seen in a non-interacting one dimensional electron gas. The strength of these features varies with the anomalous exponent, being most pronounced when γρ=0γ_ρ=0γρ​=0. We argue that this measurement provides an important experimental signature of spin-charge separation.
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.