Symmetry-protected spin gaps in quantum wires

Abstract

This work shows that a strongly correlated phase which is gapped to collective spin excitations but gapless to charge fluctuations emerges as a universal feature in one-dimensional fermionic systems obeying certain symmetries. Namely, nanowires interacting via Coulomb repulsion which are symmetric under time-reversal and spatial inversion symmetry exhibit spin gaps whenever one pair of spin-degenerate subbands is occupied and an arbitrarily weak spin-orbit interaction is present. This general result is independent of the details of the one-dimensional confinement, the fermionic spin or nature of the spin-orbit interaction. In narrow-gap semiconductors, this gap may be of order 10 \textmu eV. This strongly correlated phase may be identified both via an anomalous $h/2e$ flux periodicity in Aharonov-Bohm oscillations and $2e$ periodic Coulomb blockade, features which reflect the existence of fermionic pairing despite the absence of superconductivity and the repulsive nature of the interaction.