Asymmetric Zero-Bias Anomaly for Strongly Interacting Electrons in One Dimension

Abstract

We study a system of one-dimensional electrons in the regime of strong repulsive interactions, where the spin exchange coupling J is small compared with the Fermi energy, and the conventional Tomonaga-Luttinger theory does not apply. We show that the tunneling density of states has a form of an asymmetric peak centered near the Fermi level. In the spin-incoherent regime, where the temperature is large compared to J, the density of states falls off as a power law of energy εmeasured from the Fermi level, with the prefactor at positive energies being twice as large as that at the negative ones. In contrast, at temperatures below J the density of states forms a split peak with most of the weight shifted to negative ε.