No Arabic abstract
In the first part of our theoretical study of correlated atomic wires on substrates, we introduced lattice models for a one-dimensional quantum wire on a three-dimensional substrate and their approximation by quasi-one-dimensional effective ladder models [arXiv:1704.07350]. In this second part, we apply this approach to the case of a correlated wire with a Hubbard-type electron-electron repulsion deposited on an insulating substrate. The ground-state and spectral properties are investigated numerically using the density-matrix renormalization group method and quantum Monte Carlo simulations. As a function of the model parameters, we observe various phases with quasi-one-dimensional low-energy excitations localized in the wire, namely paramagnetic Mott insulators, Luttinger liquids, and spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg chains. The validity of the effective ladder models is assessed by studying the convergence with the number of legs and comparing to the full three-dimensional model. We find that narrow ladder models accurately reproduce the quasi-one-dimensional excitations of the full three-dimensional model but predict only qualitatively whether excitations are localized around the wire or delocalized in the three-dimensional substrate.
We present a theoretical study of correlated atomic wires deposited on substrates in two parts. In this first part, we propose lattice models for a one-dimensional quantum wire on a three-dimensional substrate and map them onto effective two-dimensional lattices using the Lanczos algorithm. We then discuss the approximation of these two-dimensional lattices by narrow ladder models that can be investigated with well-established methods for one-dimensional correlated quantum systems, such as the density-matrix renormalization group or bosonization. The validity of this approach is studied first for noninteracting electrons and then for a correlated wire with a Hubbard electron-electron repulsion using quantum Monte Carlo simulations. While narrow ladders cannot be used to represent wires on metallic substrates, they capture the physics of wires on insulating substrates if at least three legs are used. In the second part [arXiv:1704.07359], we use this approach for a detailed numerical investigation of a wire with a Hubbard-type interaction on an insulating substrate.
We investigate the low-energy collective charge excitations (plasmons, holons) in metallic atomic wires deposited on semiconducting substrates. These systems are described by two-dimensional correlated models representing strongly anisotropic lattices or weakly coupled chains. Well-established theoretical approaches and results are used to study their properties: random phase approximation for anisotropic Fermi liquids and bosonization for coupled Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids as well as Bethe Ansatz and density-matrix renormalization group methods for ladder models. We show that the Fermi and Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theories predict the same qualitative behavior for the dispersion of excitations at long wave lengths. Moreover, their scaling depends on the choice of the effective electron-electron interaction but does not characterize the dimensionality of the metallic state. Our results also suggest that such anisotropic correlated systems can exhibit two-dimensional dispersions due to the coupling between wires but remain quasi-one-dimensional strongly anisotropic conductors or retain typical features of Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids such as the power-law behaviour of the density of states at the Fermi energy. Thus it is possible that atomic wire materials such as Au/Ge(100) exhibit a mixture of features associated with one and two dimensional metals.
We present a generic grand-canonical theory for the Peierls transition in atomic wires deposited on semiconducting substrates such as In/Si(111) using a mean-field solution of the one-dimensional Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. We show that this simple low-energy effective model for atomic wires can explain naturally the occurrence of a first-order Peierls transition between a uniform metallic phase at high-temperature and a dimerized insulating phase at low temperature as well as the existence of a metastable uniform state below the critical temperature.
Linear atomic chains containing a single Kondo atom, Co, and several nonmagnetic atoms, Cu, were assembled atom by atom on Cu(111) with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. The resulting one-dimensional wires, Cu$_m$CoCu$_n$ ($0leq m, nleq 5$), exhibit a rich evolution of the single-Co Kondo effect with the variation of $m$ and $n$, as inferred from changes in the line shape of the Abrikosov-Suhl-Kondo resonance. The most striking result is the quenching of the resonance in CuCoCu$_2$ and Cu$_2$CoCu$_2$ clusters. State-of-the-art first-principles calculations were performed to unravel possible microscopic origins of the remarkable experimental observations.
We explore in detail the electronic phases of a system consisting of three non-colinear arrays of coupled quantum wires, each rotated 120 degrees with respect to the next. A perturbative renormalization-group analysis reveals that multiple correlated states can be stabilized: a $s$-wave or $d pm id$ superconductor, a charge density wave insulator, a two-dimensional Fermi liquid, and a 2D Luttinger liquid (also known as smectic metal or sliding Luttinger liquid). The model provides an effective description of electronic interactions in small-angle twisted bilayer graphene and we discuss its implications in relation to the recent observation of correlated and superconducting groundstates near commensurate densities in magic-angle twisted samples, as well as the ``strange metal behavior at finite temperatures as a natural outcome of the 2D Luttinger liquid phase.