Nonequilibrium electron spectroscopy of Luttinger liquids

Bernd Rosenow

MPI for Solid State Research, Theoretical Solid States Physics, Stuttgart, Germany

We theoretically study a Luttinger liquid (LL) driven out of equilibrium by injection of high-energy electrons. The electrons are injected into the LL locally at a fixed energy, and their spectral properties are detected at another spatial point some distance away by evaluating the average tunneling current from the LL into a resonant level with tunable energy. For energies slightly below the injection energy, the dependence of the detected current on the difference between injection and detection energies is described by a power law whose exponent depends continuously on the Luttinger parameter. In contrast, for tunneling into a chiral LL edge of a fractional quantum Hall state from the Laughlin sequence, we find that the detected current grows linearly with energy difference, despite a decreasing density of states.

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