Low-temperature conductivity of quasi-one-dimensional conductors: Luttinger liquid stabilized by impurities

Abstract

A new non-Fermi liquid state of quasi-one-dimensional conductors is suggested in which electronic system exists in a form of collection of bounded Luttinger liquids stabilized by impurities. This state is shown to be stable towards inter-chain electron hopping at low temperatures. Electronic spectrum of the system contains zero modes and collective excitations of the bounded Luttinger liquids in the segments between impurities. Zero modes give rise to randomly distributed localized electronic levels, and long-range interaction generates the Coulomb gap in the density of states at the Fermi energy. Mechanism of conductivity at low temperatures is phonon-assisted hopping via zero-mode states. At higher voltages the excitations of Luttinger liquid are involved into electron transport, and conductivity obeys power-law dependence on voltage. The results are compared with recent experimental data for NbSe 3 and TaS 3 crystals.

Equilibrium low temperature heat capacity of the spin density wave compound (TMTTF)2Br: effect of a magnetic field

“…As we discuss below, our extension of the LarkinOvchinnikov model to SDWs in a magnetic field suffers from the same weak point. Interestingly, it was pointed out by Artemenko and Remizov [19] that weak impurity potentials at high energy amount to cutting the chains into Luttinger liquids of finite length at very low temperature [20], resulting in characteristic features in the dependence of the specific heat on magnetic field [19]. Impurity effects are thus expected to be enhanced by Coulomb interactions, which might be the clue to the discrepancy in the comparison of the LarkinOvchinnikov model to experiments on the evaluation of the concentration of defects.…”

“…Impurity effects are thus expected to be enhanced by Coulomb interactions, which might be the clue to the discrepancy in the comparison of the LarkinOvchinnikov model to experiments on the evaluation of the concentration of defects. We discuss here experiments on the basis of the Larkin-Ovchinnikov model without Coulomb interactions, while Artemenko and Remizov [19] discussed related experiments with Coulomb interactions without CDW or SDW instability. Incorporting rigorously Coulomb interactions in the Larkin-Ovchinnikov model beyond qualitative arguments is an open theoretical question that we do not address here.…”

Is the Luttinger Liquid a New State of Matter?

“…It is also the case for our problem because in the main order in V −1 0 the electron system is polarized so strongly that the ground state eq. (11,15), in fact, consists of exciton-like neutral pairs [22] (we have in mind a repulsive interaction here). In other words, the "screening scale" is about the transverse size of the channel.…”

“…The first was formulated e.g. in [15] as a motivation of the work. "The concept of Luttinger liquid is an alternative to the Fermi liquid elaborated for one-dimensional electronic systems.…”

Microstructure and metal-insulator transition in single crystalline KMo4O6

“…During the last years great attention has been given to the low-dimensional (D) conductors [1][2][3] . There are several reasons for that.…”