Luttinger liquid behaviour and superconducting correlations in t-J ladders

The low energy behaviour of the isotropic t--J ladder system is investigated using exact diagonalization techniques, specifically finding the Drude weight, the charge velocity and the compressibility. By applying the ideas of Luttinger liquid theory, we determine the correlation exponent $K_\rho$ which defines the behaviour of the long range correlations in the system. The boundary to phase separation is determined and a phase diagram is presented. At low electron density, a Tomonaga-Luttinger-like phase is stabilized whilst at higher electron densities a gapped phase with power law pairing correlations is stabilized: A large region of this gapped phase is found to exhibit dominant superconducting correlations.