Coupled Luttinger Liquids

TL;DR

This paper reviews the physics of coupled one-dimensional Luttinger liquids, exploring how interchain interactions influence their low-energy properties, including spin gaps and superconducting tendencies, with new insights into multi-chain systems and bosonization methods.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme for handling fermion anticommutation in bosonization and analyzes the effects of interchain coupling on spin and charge excitations in multi-chain systems.

Findings

Even number of coupled chains have a spin gap.

Two-chain systems exhibit d-wave superconductivity with a spin gap.

Weak repulsive interactions favor d-type superconducting pairing.

Abstract

Many one--dimensional quantum systems, in particular interacting electron and spin systems, can be described a Luttinger liquids. Here, some basic ideas of this picture of one--dimensional systems are briefly reviewed. I then discuss the effect of interchain coupling for a finite number of parallel chains. In the case of spin chains coupled by exchange interactions, the low--energy properties are radically different according to whether the number of coupled chains is even or odd: even number of chains have a gap in the spin excitations, whereas odd numbers of chains are gapless. The effect of interchain tunneling is analyzed for two and three coupled chains of itinerant fermions: for repulsive interactions, the two--chain system is ``universally'' found to be a d--wave superconductor, with a gap in the spin excitation spectrum. On the other hand, for three chains the ground state depends both on the boundary conditions in the transverse direction and on the strength of the interactions. Weak repulsive interactions in all cases lead to dominant superconducting pairing of d--type. An example of a three--leg spin ladder with a spin gap is proposed. A general scheme to keep track of fermion anticommutation in the bosonization technique is developed.