We consider a mixture of one-dimensional strongly interacting Fermi gases with up to six components, subjected to a longitudinal harmonic confinement. In the limit of infinitely strong repulsions we provide an exact solution which generalizes the one for the two-component mixture. We show that an imbalanced mixture under harmonic confinement displays partial spatial separation among the components, with a structure which depends on the relative population of the various components. Furthermore, we provide a symmetry characterization of the ground and excited states of the mixture introducing and evaluating a suitable operator, namely the conjugacy class sum. We show that, even under external confinement, the gas has a definite symmetry which corresponds to the most symmetric one compatible with the imbalance among the components. This generalizes the predictions of the Lieb-Mattis theorem for a fermionic mixture with more than two components.

Quantum dynamics is very sensitive to dimensionality. While two-dimensional electronic systems form Fermi liquids, one-dimensional systems—Tomonaga–Luttinger liquids—are described by purely bosonic excitations, even though they are initially made of fermions. With the advent of coherent single-electron sources, the quantum dynamics of such a liquid is now accessible at the single-electron level. Here, we report on time-of-flight measurements of ultrashort few-electron charge pulses injected into a quasi one-dimensional quantum conductor. By changing the confinement potential we can tune the system from the one-dimensional Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid limit to the multi-channel Fermi liquid and show that the plasmon velocity can be varied over almost an order of magnitude. These results are in quantitative agreement with a parameter-free theory and demonstrate a powerful probe for directly investigating real-time dynamics of fractionalisation phenomena in low-dimensional conductors.