Photon echo from lensing of fractional excitations in Tomonaga-Luttinger spin liquid

Abstract

We study theoretically the nonlinear optical response of Tomonaga-Luttinger spin liquid in the context of terahertz (THz) two-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (2DCS). Using the gapless phase of the XXZ-type spin chain as an example, we show that its third-order nonlinear magnetic susceptibilities $\chi^{(3)}_{+--+}$ and $\chi^{(3)}_{-++-}$ exhibit photon echo, where $\pm$ refers to the left/right-hand circular polarization with respect to the $S^z$ axis. The photon echo arises from a ``lensing'' phenomenon in which the wave packets of fractional excitations move apart and then come back toward each other, amounting to a refocusing of the excitations' world lines. Renormalization group irrelevant corrections to the fixed point Hamiltonian result in dispersion and/or damping of the wave packets, which can be sensitively detected by lensing and consequently the photon echo. Our results thus unveil the strength of THz-2DCS in probing the dynamical properties of the collective excitations in a prototypical gapless many-body system.