Emergence and Disruption of Spin-Charge Separation in One-Dimensional Repulsive Fermions

Thermal disruption of a Luttinger liquid

The Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) theory describes the low-energy excitations of strongly correlated one-dimensional (1D) fermions. In the past years, a number of studies have provided a detailed understanding of this universality class. More recently, theoretical investigations that go beyond the standard low-temperature, linear-response TLL regime have been developed. While these provide a basis for understanding the dynamics of the spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid, there are few experimental investigations in this regime. Here we report the observation of a thermally induced, spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid in a ⁶Li atomic Fermi gas confined to 1D. We use Bragg spectroscopy to measure the suppression of spin-charge separation and the decay of correlations as the temperature is increased. Our results probe the crossover between the coherent and incoherent regimes of the Luttinger liquid and elucidate the roles of the charge and the spin degrees of freedom in this regime.

New trends in quantum integrability: recent experiments with ultracold atoms

Over the past two decades quantum engineering has made significant advances in our ability to create genuine quantum many-body systems using ultracold atoms. In particular, some prototypical exactly solvable Yang-Baxter systems have been successfully realized allowing us to confront elegant and sophisticated exact solutions of these systems with their experimental counterparts. The new experimental developments show a variety of fundamental one-dimensional (1D) phenomena, ranging from the generalized hydrodynamics to dynamical fermionization, Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, collective excitations, fractional exclusion statistics, quantum holonomy, spin-charge separation, competing orders with high spin symmetry and quantum impurity problems. This article briefly reviews these developments and provides rigorous understanding of those observed phenomena based on the exact solutions while highlighting the uniqueness of 1D quantum physics. The precision of atomic physics realizations of integrable many-body problems continues to inspire significant developments in mathematics and physics while at the same time offering the prospect to contribute to future quantum technology.

Spin-charge separation in a one-dimensional Fermi gas with tunable interactions

Ultracold atoms confined to periodic potentials have proven to be a powerful tool for quantum simulation of complex many-body systems. We confine fermions to one dimension to realize the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid model, which describes the highly collective nature of their low-energy excitations. We use Bragg spectroscopy to directly excite either the spin or charge waves for various strengths of repulsive interaction. We observe that the velocity of the spin and charge excitations shift in opposite directions with increasing interaction, a hallmark of spin-charge separation. The excitation spectra are in quantitative agreement with the exact solution of the Yang-Gaudin model and the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory. Furthermore, we identify effects of nonlinear corrections to this theory that arise from band curvature and back-scattering.