Luttinger liquid superlattices: realization of gapless insulating phases

We investigate Luttinger Liquid superlattices, a periodic structure composed of two kinds of one-dimensional systems of interacting electrons. We calculate several properties of the low-energy sector: the effective charge and spin velocities, the compressibility, various correlation functions, the Landauer conductance and the Drude weight. The low-energy properties are subsumed into effective parameters, much like homogeneous one-dimensional systems. A generic result is the weighted average nature of these parameters, in proportion to the spatial extent of the underlying subunits, pointing to the possibility of ``engineered'' structures. As a specific realization, we consider a one-dimensional Hubbard superlattice, which consists of a periodic arrangement of two long Hubbard chains with different coupling constants and different hopping amplitudes. This system exhibits a rich phase diagram with several phases, both metallic and insulating. We have found that gapless insulating phases are present over a wide range of parameters.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figures, RevTeX

Lorentz-violating nonminimal coupling contributions in mesonic hydrogen atoms and generation of photon higher-order derivative terms

We have studied the contributions of Lorentz-violating CPT-odd and CPT-even nonminimal couplings to the energy spectrum of the mesonic hydrogen and the higher-order radiative corrections to the effective action of the photon sector of a Lorentz-violating version of the scalar electrodynamics. By considering the complex scalar field describes charged mesons (pion or kaon), the non-relativistic limit of the model allows to attain upper-bounds by analyzing its contribution to the mesonic hydrogen energy. By using the experimental data for the $1S$ strong correction shift and the pure QED transitions $4P \rightarrow 3P$, the best upper-bound for the CPT-odd coupling is $<10^{-12}\text{eV}^{-1}$ and for the CPT-even one is $<10^{-16}\text{eV}^{-2}$. Besides, the CPT-odd radiative correction to the photon action is a dimension-5 operator which looks like a higher-order Carroll-Field-Jackiw term. The CPT-even radiative contribution to the photon effective action is a dimension-6 operator which would be a higher-order derivative version of the minimal CPT-even term of the standard model extension

Analytical study of tunneling times in flat histogram Monte Carlo

We present a model for the dynamics in energy space of multicanonical simulation methods that lends itself to a rather complete analytic characterization. The dynamics is completely determined by the density of states. In the \pm J 2D spin glass the transitions between the ground state level and the first excited one control the long time dynamics. We are able to calculate the distribution of tunneling times and relate it to the equilibration time of a starting probability distribution. In this model, and possibly in any model in which entering and exiting regions with low density of states are the slowest processes in the simulations, tunneling time can be much larger (by a factor of O(N)) than the equilibration time of the probability distribution. We find that these features also hold for the energy projection of single spin flip dynamics.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, published in Europhysics Letters (2005