Brownian scattering of a spinon in a Luttinger liquid

We consider strongly interacting one-dimensional electron liquids where elementary excitations carry either spin or charge. At small temperatures a spinon created at the bottom of its band scatters off low-energy spin- and charge-excitations and follows the diffusive motion of a Brownian particle in momentum space. We calculate the mobility characterizing these processes, and show that the resulting diffusion coefficient of the spinon is parametrically enhanced at low temperatures compared to that of a mobile impurity in a spinless Luttinger liquid. We briefly discuss that this hints at the relevance of spin in the process of equilibration of strongly interacting one-dimensional electrons, and comment on implications for transport in clean single channel quantum wires

Incoherent pair tunneling in the pseudogap phase of cuprates

Motivated by a recent experiment by Bergeal et al., we reconsider incoherent pair tunneling in a cuprate junction formed from an optimally doped superconducting lead and an underdoped normal metallic lead. We study the impact of the pseudogap on the pair tunneling by describing fermions in the underdoped lead with a model self-energy that has been developed to reproduce photoemission data. We find that the pseudogap causes an additional temperature dependent suppression of the pair contribution to the tunneling current. We discuss consistency with available experimental data and propose future experimental directions.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Magnetic penetration depth in disordered iron-based superconductors

We study the effect of disorder on the London penetration depth in iron-based superconductors. The theory is based on a two-band model with quasi-two-dimensional Fermi surfaces, which allows for the coexistence region in the phase diagram between magnetic and superconducting states in the presence of intraband and interband scattering. Within the quasiclassical approximation we derive and solve Eilenberger's equations, which include a weak external magnetic field, and provide analytical expressions for the penetration depth in the various limiting cases. A complete numerical analysis of the doping and temperature dependence of the London penetration depth reveals the crucial effect of disorder scattering, which is especially pronounced in the coexistence phase. The experimental implications of our results are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Interaction-induced backscattering in short quantum wires

We study interaction-induced backscattering in clean quantum wires with adiabatic contacts exposed to a voltage bias. Particle backscattering relaxes such systems to a fully equilibrated steady state only on length scales exponentially large in the ratio of bandwidth of excitations and temperature. Here we focus on shorter wires in which full equilibration is not accomplished. Signatures of relaxation then are due to backscattering of hole excitations close to the band bottom which perform a diffusive motion in momentum space while scattering from excitations at the Fermi level. This is reminiscent to the first passage problem of a Brownian particle and, regardless of the interaction strength, can be described by an inhomogeneous Fokker-Planck equation. From general solutions of the latter we calculate the hole backscattering rate for different wire lengths and discuss the resulting length dependence of interaction-induced correction to the conductance of a clean single channel quantum wire.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure