14 Externe wissenschaftliche Einrichtungen
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Item Open Access Functional renormalization group analysis of Luttinger liquids with impurities(2006) Andergassen, Sabine; Metzner, Walter (Prof. Dr.)In one-dimensional quantum wires the interplay of electron correlations and impurities strongly influences the low-energy physics. The diversity of energy scales and the competition of correlations in interacting Fermi systems can be treated very efficiently with the functional renormalization group (fRG), describing the gradual evolution from a microscopic model Hamiltonian to the effective low-energy action as a function of a continuously decreasing energy cutoff. The fRG provides the universal low-energy asymptotics as well as nonuniversal properties, and in particular an answer to the important question at what scale the ultimate asymptotics sets in. The lowest order truncation of the fRG hierarchy of flow equations considered previously for spinless fermions is generalized to spin-1/2 systems and extended including renormalization of the two-particle interaction, in addition to renormalization of the impurity potential. The underlying approximations are devised for weak interactions and arbitrary impurity strengths. A comparison with numerical density-matrix renormalization results for systems with up to 1000 sites shows that the fRG is remarkably accurate even for intermediate interaction strengths. We investigate the influence of impurities on spectral and transport properties of fermionic lattice models with short-range interactions. The results capture relevant energy scales and crossover phenomena, in addition to the universal low-energy asymptotics. For weak and intermediate impurity strengths the asymptotic behavior is approached only at rather low energy scales, accessible only for very large systems. For spin-1/2 systems two-particle backscattering leads to striking effects, which are not captured if the bulk system is approximated by its low-energy fixed point, the Luttinger model. In particular, the expected decrease of spectral weight near the impurity and of the conductance at low energy scales is often preceded by a pronounced increase, and the asymptotic power laws are modified by logarithmic corrections.