English

Universal Symmetry-Protected Resonances in a Spinful Luttinger Liquid

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2016-08-30 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study the problem of resonant tunneling through a quantum dot in a spinful Luttinger liquid. For a range of repulsive interactions, we find that for symmetric barriers there exist resonances with a universal peak conductance 2ge2/h2g^* e^2/h that are controlled by a non-trivial intermediate fixed point. This fixed point is also a quantum critical point separating symmetry-protected topological phases. By tuning the system through resonance, all SPT phases can be accessed. For a particular interaction strength with Luttinger parameters gρ=1/3g_\rho=1/3 and gσ=1g_\sigma=1, we show that the problem is equivalent to a two channel SU(3)SU(3) Kondo problem(SU(3)2SU(3)_2 CFT). At the Toulouse limit, both problems can be mapped to a quantum Brownian motion model on a Kagome lattice, which in turn is related to the quantum Brownian motion on a honeycomb lattice and the three-channel SU(2)SU(2) Kondo problem(SU(2)3SU(2)_3 CFT). "Level-rank duality" in the quantum Brownian motion model relating SU(2)kSU(2)_k CFT to SU(k)2SU(k)_2 CFT is also explored. Utilizing the boundary conformal field theory, the on-resonance conductance of our resonant tunneling problem is calculated as well as the scaling dimension of the leading relevant operator. This allows us to compute the scaling behavior of the resonance line-shape as a function of temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1604.08280,
  title  = {Universal Symmetry-Protected Resonances in a Spinful Luttinger Liquid},
  author = {Yichen Hu and C. L. Kane},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.08280},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

17 pages, 16 figures