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PLASMONICS

Testing the nonlinear Luttinger liquid

Nature Materials volume 19, pages 931–932 (2020)Cite this article

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The lifetime of plasmonic excitations in semiconducting carbon nanotubes is found to strongly depend on the carrier density, offering a platform to study non-conventional one-dimensional electron dynamics and realize integrated nanophotonic devices.

The drastic effect of interaction on the dynamics of electrons confined to one dimension gives rise to a collective state known as a Luttinger liquid1. This many-body state is usually described in a model where the electron dispersion (energy dependence on momentum) is strictly linear. Such linear Luttinger liquid exhibits unusual properties1,2, including long-lived plasmonic excitations, which have been experimentally observed in metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs)3,4,5. On the other hand, a more general theoretical description of interacting one-dimensional (1D) systems with nonlinear electronic dispersions — nonlinear Luttinger liquids — has been proposed6,7, but its experimental investigation has been limited to a few works8,9. Now, writing in Nature Materials, Feng Wang and collaborators10 report the observation of electric-field tunable plasmonic excitations in semiconducting CNTs, providing evidence of 1D electron dynamics beyond the behaviour captured by a conventional linear Luttinger liquid formalism.

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Fig. 1: Plasmonic lifetimes in a nonlinear Luttinger liquid.

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  1. Departments of Physics and Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Leonid I. Glazman

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  1. Leonid I. Glazman
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Correspondence to Leonid I. Glazman.

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Glazman, L.I. Testing the nonlinear Luttinger liquid. Nat. Mater. 19, 931–932 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0675-y

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