Relaxation in Luttinger liquids: Bose-Fermi duality

Abstract

We explore the life time of excitations in a dispersive Luttinger liquid. We perform a bosonization supplemented by a sequence of unitary transformations that allows us to treat the problem in terms of weakly interacting quasiparticles. The relaxation described by the resulting Hamiltonian is analyzed by bosonic and (after a refermionization) by fermionic perturbation theory. We show that the the fermionic and bosonic formulations of the problem exhibit a remarkable strong-weak-coupling duality. Specifically, the fermionic theory is characterized by a dimensionless coupling constant $\lambda= m^*l^2T$ and the bosonic theory by $\lambda^{-1}$, where $1/m^*$ and $l$ characterize the curvature of the fermionic and bosonic spectra, respectively, and $T$ is the temperature.