Properties of a Luttinger Liquid with Boundaries at Finite Temperature and Size

Abstract

We use bosonization methods to calculate the exact finite-temperature single-electron Green's function of a spinful Luttinger liquid confined by open boundaries. The corresponding local spectral density is constructed and analyzed in detail. The interplay between boundary, finite-size and thermal effects are shown to dramatically influence the low-energy properties of the system. In particular, the well-known zero-temperature critical behavior in the bulk always crosses over to a boundary dominated regime in the vicinity of the Fermi level. Thermal fluctuations cause an enhanced depletion of spectral weight for small energies E, with the spectral density scaling as E^2 for E much less than the temperature. Consequences for photoemission experiments are discussed.Comment: 18 pages in revtex format including 5 embedded figures (using epsf). The latest complete postscript file is available from http://fy.chalmers.se/~eggert/papers/longlutt.ps or by request from [email protected]. To appear in Phys. Rev. B (Dec. 1997