Tunneling conductance of long-range Coulomb interacting Luttinger liquid

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how long-range Coulomb interactions alter tunneling conductance in one-dimensional Luttinger liquids, revealing scale-dependent exponents and cautioning against straightforward interpretation of experimental data.

Contribution

It extends the tunneling theory to Coulomb-interacting Luttinger liquids, highlighting scale-dependent conductance behavior and differences from short-range models.

Findings

Tunneling conductance exhibits apparent power-law decay with scale-dependent exponents.

Effective tunneling exponents increase slowly as energy decreases.

Crossover to free Fermi gas behavior occurs at high energy.

Abstract

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.