Crossover between Luttinger and Fermi liquid behavior in weakly coupled metallic chains

Abstract

We use higher-dimensional bosonization to study the normal state of electrons in weakly coupled metallic chains interacting with long-range Coulomb forces. Particular attention is paid to the crossover between Luttinger and Fermi liquid behavior as the interchain hopping is varied. Although in the physically interesting case of finite but small interchain hopping the quasi-particle residue does not vanish, the single-particle Green's function exhibits the signature of Luttinger liquid behavior (i.e. anomalous scaling and spin-charge separation) in a large intermediate parameter regime. Using realistic parameters, we find that the scaling behavior in this regime is characterized by an anomalous dimension of the order of unity, as suggested by recent experiments on quasi-one-dimensional conductors. Our calculation gives new insights into the approximations inherent in higher-dimensional bosonization. We also compare our approach with other methods.