Boundary Green's function for spin-incoherent interacting electrons in one dimension

Journal article, 2007

The spin-incoherent regime of one-dimensional electrons has recently been explored using the Bethe ansatz and a bosonized path integral approach, revealing that the spin incoherence dramatically influences the correlations of charge excitations. We here introduce a bosonization scheme for strongly interacting electrons, allowing us to generalize the description to account for the presence of an open boundary. By calculating the single-electron Green's function we find that the charge sector power-law scaling is highly sensitive to the boundary. Our result allows for a detailed description of the crossover between boundary and bulk regimes. We predict that scanning tunneling microscopy on a spin-incoherent system will pick up oscillations in the differential tunneling conductance as a function of the applied voltage V at "intermediate" distances x from a real or a dynamically generated boundary. The wavelength of the oscillations, pi v(c)/x, probes the speed v(c) of the charge excitations, and therefore the strength of the electron-electron interaction.