The spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid

TL;DR

This paper discusses the spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid, a regime where spin excitations are thermally disordered while charge excitations remain near their ground state, revealing new universal properties and experimental signatures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent theoretical advances and experimental evidence for the spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid regime in one-dimensional systems.

Findings

Identification of the spin-incoherent regime at low temperatures

Distinct qualitative properties from standard Luttinger liquids

Experimental indications in semiconductor quantum wires

Abstract

In contrast to the well known Fermi liquid theory of three dimensions, interacting one-dimensional and quasi one-dimensional systems of fermions are described at low energy by an effective theory known as Luttinger liquid theory. This theory is expressed in terms of collective many-body excitations that show exotic behavior such as spin-charge separation. Luttinger liquid theory is commonly applied on the premise that "low energy" describes both the spin and charge sectors. However, when the interactions in the system are very strong, as they typically are at low particle densities, the ratio of spin to charge energy may become exponentially small. It is then possible at very low temperatures for the energy to be low compared to the characteristic charge energy, but still high compared to the characteristic spin energy. This energy window of near ground-state charge degrees of freedom, but highly thermally excited spin degrees of freedom is called a spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid. The spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid exhibits a higher degree universality than the Luttinger liquid and its properties are qualitatively distinct. In this colloquium I detail some of the recent theoretical developments in the field and describe experimental indications of such a regime in gated semiconductor quantum wires.