Transverse transport in coupled strongly correlated electronic chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interchain hopping in coupled Luttinger liquids behaves, revealing suppression of coherence at certain interaction strengths and highlighting incoherent transverse conductivity, with implications for experiments in quasi-1D materials.

Contribution

It provides numerical evidence on the suppression of inter-chain coherence in coupled Luttinger liquids and analyzes transverse conductivity behavior.

Findings

Inter-chain coherent hopping can be suppressed for pprox 0.4 or smaller.

Transverse conductivity shows a strong incoherent component even with coherent hopping.

Implications for optical experiments in quasi-1D organic and high-T_c superconductors.

Abstract

One-particle interchain hopping in a system of coupled Luttinger liquids is investigated by use of exact diagonalizations techniques. Firstly, the two chain problem of spinless fermions is studied in order to see the behaviour of the band splitting as a function of the exponent \alpha which characterizes the 1D Luttinger liquid. We give numerical evidence that inter-chain coherent hopping (defined by a non-vanishing splitting) can be totally suppressed for \alpha\sim 0.4 or even smaller \alpha values. The transverse conductivity is shown to exhibit a strong incoherent part even when coherent inter-chain hopping is believed to occur (at small \alpha values). Implications for the optical experiments in quasi-1D organic or high-T_c superconductors is outlined.