Ponderous impurities in a Luttinger liquid

TL;DR

This paper derives analytical Green functions for a Luttinger liquid with mobile impurities using bosonization and perturbation theory, revealing how impurity mobility depends on velocity and temperature, including resonance effects for two impurities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytical approach combining bosonization and perturbation theory to study impurities in Luttinger liquids, including force and mobility calculations.

Findings

Linear mobility shows a power-law temperature dependence.

Impurities exhibit nonlinear force-velocity relations at high speeds.

Two impurities display resonance phenomena based on their separation.

Abstract

In this work, analytical expressions for the Green function of a Luttinger liquid are derived with one and two mobile impurities (heavy particles) using a combination of bosonization and perturbative approaches. The calculations are done in the random phase approximation (RPA) limit using the powerful non-chiral bosonization technique (NCBT) which is nothing but the resummation of the most singular parts of the RPA terms of the Green function expanded out in powers of the forward scattering between fermions with the source of inhomogeneities treated exactly. The force acting on the heavy particle(s) is studied as a function of its terminal velocity, both in the linear and non-linear regime. Linear mobility (which is valid for impurities moving much slower than a certain cross-over speed) has a power-law temperature dependence whose exponent has a closed algebraic expression in terms of the various parameters in the problem. This expression interpolates between the ballistic regime of no-coupling with the fermions and the no-tunneling regime. When the speed of the impurity is much larger than this cross-over speed, the applied force depends non linearly on the speed and this too is a power-law with a closely related exponent. The case of two mobile impurities is also studied whose mobility exhibits peculiar resonances when their mutual separation is appropriately chosen.